


The Great Resurrection of Laura Moon

by theredhoodie



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-11-15 07:38:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18069299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredhoodie/pseuds/theredhoodie
Summary: This was a bad, shitty thing, that it would lead her down roads she should not go, and all the shit she’d done was bound to catch up with her, but fuck.She was alive.She’d take it.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Just a bit of season 2 speculation. 
> 
> I honestly don't know what this is except that these two are super fun to write and I cannot wait for s2 of this show. Like. DAMN!

They stand in the middle of a crossroads-haha, Fate, fuck you-and he's swearing off the ride that just dumped them and she's nibbling on her thumb nail.

She really couldn't see all that well anymore and Shadow's light was states away, barely an afterthought in her vision. The nail shifted on the nail bed and she stopped nibbling before it ripped right off.

"Yelling won't bring 'em back," she said, her voice rough. She coughed but it doesn't help. Her ribs rattle beneath her skin.

He said something decidedly wicked in a language she doesn't know and flips off the tail lights before they disappear over a hill. He pulled her in a random direction, tugging on her newly sewn on arm.

She pushed him off and he stumbled clear across the road.

"You are testing me, dead wife."

She walked forward, hands tucked into the pockets of her red bomber jacket. It was cute, and she would have cared if she wasn't, y'know, dead. "I thought that was our thing," she called out finally, listening for his steps against the gravely country road.

He lit a cigarette and the smoke reached her nose. It smelled like death in the way that only something dead could smell. "We have no thing, you and I."

She tilted her head to the side and trained her eyes upward. There must be stars up there, but the sky was nothing but a smeared grey abyss. "No? Then why are we travelling across the country together huh? Wisconsin is that way." She shoves her thumb over her shoulder. "Your resurrection idea was bullshit and the fucker who killed me is that way, too."

Anger, cold and slow like a glacier, was just about the only thing she felt these days. Emotions in death had been washed away to nothing. Not that she felt much while she was alive either. But anger wouldn't keep her rotting body together for much longer.

"You promised to take me to the god who killed me. I plan on killing him myself."

"I have no doubt you'll try," he said, cigarette quickly burning down to ash, a single ring of fire in the dark of night. "But you're just a dead wife and he's an old fuck but he's more powerful than you. And I think you'd fall apart before you got the chance."

Her hands curled into fists and she wished they were in a car so she could drive it into a tree out of frustration. "Thanks for reminding me, I hadn't noticed." Her nails had been shifting around on her nail beds for days now, she was paler and more bruised than ever, her eyes were nearly useless and while she had some supernatural strength thanks to the coin nestled under her skin, that wouldn't keep her from falling to pieces.

They walked in silence, nothing but the crunch of shoes against road, the occasional rustle of a night animal, him pulling another roughly made cigarette from somewhere to light and inhale.

"You ever gonna tell me where we're going?" she asked finally. She's been trying to pry that information out of him for what felt like weeks now and gotten nowhere.

"Can't," came his short reply.

She rolled her eyes. Scoffed. "Can't, or won't?"

"Can't. Magic."

"Fucking magic," she mumbled. That's how she got into this stupid mess in the first place. She rubbed her numb fingertips to the base of her sternum, feeling the ridges and bumps of ribs and the very coin keeping her alive.

"Keep asking me and I'll take my coin back and leave you on the side of the road."

"You can't threaten me. It's my coin now."

His steps stopped and, against all odds, she stopped and turned toward him, the ring of fire from his dying cigarette the only thing she could see. "You're an ungrateful bitch, you know that, dead wife?"

"Says the man who ran my car off the road and killed me," she shot back. The anger curled up inside of her, poised to strike.

She missed the subtle emotions in his face. He didn't glow like Shadow; he was  _just_  a shadow.

"I had it. My coin." He nodded toward her and disappeared, cigarette under boot.

"What?"

"That joy ride in the ice cream truck, remember that?"

She did. Unpleasantly. Cab full of melting sweets and flies more attracted to her than sugar.

He stepped toward her. She could feel only the tiniest bit of heat coming off of him. "There you were, thrown out the damn truck, chest wide open."

She tilted her head to the side, the anger broiling into something solid she could hold on to. "Did you try to take my fucking coin?"

"Didn't have to try, dead wife." He tapped her chest, hastily stitched up under her jacket, her shirt thin and useless at keeping her insides  _in_. "It rolled off on its own there, leaving you dead. Really dead."

The anger fell away like lifting the lid off a pot boiling over.  _Dead_  dead. Did she remember that? She recalled no aurora borealis in the sky over a desert; no man in black robes; no hot tub for her to crawl into to spend the rest of eternity.

There was just….nothing. Blackness. Emptiness. Nothing at all.

For the first time in years, since way before the met Shadow, a spark of fear rippled through her bones.

"What do you mean?" All of her flame, her fire, her fury was gone. He could yell at her all he wanted but she had no strength to do the same. Not in the dark of night, not with this coin buried in her chest.

"I woke up and there she sat, bright as a beaut, waiting for me. I coulda left you there, dead wife, taken my lucky coin and gone about my life."

She trudged up just enough spite. "Why didn't you? That's all you ever fucking talk about. My coin this, my coin that."

"I know it!" His voice exploded over the silence. Farms were all around them as far as the eye could see. Nothing moved, not even another car on the road. Not for miles. "I had exactly what I fucking wanted."

"Did you feel guilty for killing me?" Oh, she was going to rub that in for the rest of eternity. It wasn't going to get old. At least, not until she strangled the life out of the god who had her killed like she was just some puppet.

"No. I mighta caught feelings for you."

"Oh." She laughed. "You sweet on me, Sweeney?" She never used his name; it felt wrong on her tongue.

"Murdery feelings, dead wife," he clarified, which made her feel eons better.

"So you gave me back  _my_  coin so you could what? Murder me again?" She crossed her arms, her right arm creaking and sucking in the unnatural movement, the joint having been torn apart.

"I'm not that bad of a man, dead wife."

"Keep telling yourself that."

"I didn't enjoy killing you but I had a debt to pay and I did what the old man told me."

"I don't care why you did it."

"Hmmmm."

Footsteps on the gravel again. The conversation was over and she didn't know what to make of it. Her life may very well be hanging in the balance, with nothing but this disastrous leprechaun to keep her from fading away into that black nothingness.

Once upon a time she would have prefered that kind of end. But now she knew that there was so much more and she was selfish. She didn't want to give it up.

"Thank you," she said, so quietly she wasn't sure she'd said it aloud or that it could be heard over their footfalls.

"I do one bloody selfless thing and fuck myself over," he grumbled out around yet another cigarette. Were they like his coins? Could he just grab them out of thin air? Made her wish she could taste more than ash. "Keep your thanks, dead wife."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Be thankful you don't need to eat, dead wife," he said. All around were tables laden with sweet fruits, decanters of milk and blood red wine, crumbly bread. That hadn't been his style for a long while, resorting to sickly red meat and all the harsh alcohol he could find, but it thrummed at an ancient part of himself that remembered the  _before._

She walked just close enough to him to be nudged in the proper direction without actually being touched, her dull eyes covered in a sash of silken fabric that smelled like flowers. Or, it would have smelled like flowers if any of her senses worked right. "Why? Did you bring me to the world's worst brunch diner?"

The land underfoot had changed from rocky terrain to soft and lush half a mile back, when the wind picked up and swooped around them and told him they were in the right place. A ghost of a being, once powerful and strong, whispered in his ear and offered the perfumed blindfold for use.

"Only if you're human."

She huffed and moved to pull off the blindfold. He stopped her, his grip stronger than usual amongst a court of his kind. She let go.

"Stay put," he leaned down to say in her ear. "I mean it, dead wife."

There was no amount of trust between them but she stayed still for once. Perhaps staying still was nothing to a woman who was dead, never changing, frozen forever.

The white house on top of the hill was filled with candles, vines and flowers run rampant. On the stone patio, facing the treeline was an arch filled with thorny vines and poison flowers and underneath, on a longue fit for a queen, sat a woman in black, her skin fair, her eyes green, her hair a shining crow's coat.

The Mórrigan.

Others of the so called fair folk joined in with the tempting music, the fine foods. At a glance they looked human enough; but didn't they all? Underneath that veil was fangs and wings and big pupil less eyes and all manner of creature long since scattered across the world.

The dead wife, she called attention to herself just by  _being_. Not only was she human, but she was dead and everyone here had noses sharp as knives if they hadn't been burned off with cocaine and heroin or anything else someone could snuff.

"I'll...be...damned," the woman in black said, lips stained red from the wine in her hand. "If it isn't our own Mad King, returned."

Behind him, the dead wife laughed. He could guess her thoughts:  _You a king? Well fuck me sideways, I've never been so shocked in my god damn life. What're you the king of anyway? Drunken murderers?_  Or something like that.

"Glad to see you're doing well," he said to the Mórrigan. Unlike him, she was a goddess, someone Odin may have or might still try to join his cause, his war.

The woman laughed and swung her feet off the longue. They were bare and had a metal ring sparkling on each toe. "These  _Wiccan_  girls, modern witches...they serve me well." She motioned him forward. He obliged, taking in the red in her eyes, the wisps of wrinkles on her skin. "They offer me pet sacrifices. Still! In this day and age, imagine. And what do you have? The only people who believe in you, Mad King, are school children."

She drank and laughed and he had a cup put in his hand. Milk. Not nearly as tempting as it once was. "I'm doing just fine, as you can see."

The queen stopped suddenly, her face falling serious and grim. She sniffed at the air. "You smell of dead things." She peered around his form, though she was almost as tall as he, he was far broader than her willow frame. Bloodshot eyes fell on the dead woman standing still, just beyond reach.

"What is that?" she asked, eyes wide and curious.

"A dead wife walking," he told her and she settled back on her chair, crossing her legs.

"Why did you bring her here?"

He thought about it. What he'd said before is true. He could have taken the coin on that street. He could have left her at Ostara's and been done with it. And yet here he was, using up all his favors and life debts for a god damn dead woman.

"You once told me that you owed me your life, after the war with Maub."

The Mórrigan made a face at the name of a past rival. She waved her goblet around. "Perhaps I already repaid that debt," she offered.

He shook his head. "No. You have not." They locked eyes and neither of them blinked for a long time.

Finally, the woman relented, rolling her shoulders and glancing to the side as someone refilled her goblet with paper light fingers. "I deal in death and war. Not dead  _things_."

He shoved his goblet at the nearest set of hands and approached her as intimidatingly as possible. "Where are your sisters then?"

She blanched, fury rising behind her tired eyes. They instantly grew sharp and she stood once more, facing him with barely a breadth of space between them. "Do not speak of my sisters, Mad King," she warned, her hand clutching at the goblet until it began to creak and bend.

"I won't.  _If_  you help me with the dead wife."

Minutes expanded and contracted. Music still flowed from inside the house, marked by spots of laughter and the twinkling of crystal and jewels. A breeze wafted through lazily, holding onto the scents of pungent flowers, settling sickly sweet into the air on the patio.

"Yes," the Mórrigan said finally, binding herself to a deal with a single word. He inclined his head out of a habit, thousands of years old. "Show me your dead thing."

With no dead wives allowed into her house, the queen, the goddess, followed him onto the dewy grass where the blindfolded, uncharacteristically quiet dead wife stood.

One flourished arm later and the blindfold was removed. Flat, grey eyes gazed upon a house filled with candles, the light of them just about all she could see.

"My, my," the Mórrigan said, walking around the wife in question. "What happened here?"

There was a cricket filled silence. "Am I allowed to speak now?" she asked sarcastically, eyes turned toward the large shadow of the man she'd followed all this way.

"Yes," the queen answered instead. "What is your name?"

"Laura Moon."

"Hmmm...how did you die?"

"Ask your," she held in a laugh threatening to bubble out, " _Mad King_."

The Mórrigan turned to him and he shrugged. "A god wanted her dead. I did it."

The ethereal woman went round and round until she stopped, right in front of her. Much to her surprise, she could make out the woman's faintly beating heart, a tiny pulse of light.

"Take off your clothes," the Mórrigan instructed.

"Um...right here?"

"No, you're right." The Mórrigan blinded her again with the silk cloth. "We shall go inside. That's where the magic is."

He watched the queen guide the dead wife through what remained of her court. He followed, settling in, grabbing a handful of grapes here, a piece of oiled bread there. Decadent and surely better than the shit he'd been eating this whole trip.

They walked deeper and deeper into the house that looked smaller on the outside than it appeared on the inside. Down stairs and through doors until the walls around them were not wood or stone, but damp earth.

"What are you going to do to me?" the dead wife asked.

The Mórrigan's fingers dug into her failing flesh at her shoulders. "Oh, Laura Moon...I will give you life. It is what's been asked of me."

"What kind of life? I'm living just fine."

"The hell you are, dead wife," he said, ducking under tree roots. "You're gonna start losing nails and hair and teeth soon abouts."

"I only have you to thank!" Her retort rang through the dark corridor and the room it suddenly opened into.

It was dark, lit only by the otherworldly light from the pool in the middle. Dark dressed forms lined the edges of the space, not bothering to hide in human forms. They were fierce and molded to the aspects of them that people still believed in. Monsters, monsters all of them.

From where he stood, he couldn't tell if the liquid in the pool was water or blood. It didn't really matter, either way, if the queen could do what she said she could.

The Mórrigan spoke in the old tongue to some of those standing around the room. Attendants spurred suddenly to life with a task to do other than standing there, wasting away.

"Now, what exactly is keeping you alive, Laura Moon?" With nimble fingers, the tall black haired woman stripped the dead wife of her blindfold, her red jacket, her shirt, her boots, her pants. Nasty stitches shone against her skin, pale and dead, across her chest and around one shoulder. They weren't scars, as she didn't  _heal_.

"She nicked my lucky coin," he put in, arms crossed, eying the liquid in the pool as it started to move as if on its own accord. Everything about this place was drenched in the old world. He'd forgotten what that felt like.

"You gave it to me!" the dead wife said, glaring in his general direction.

"I was drunk."

"Aren't you always?" she huffed, crossing her arms.

Arms that the Mórrigan pried open. The woman looked closely at the dead thing in front of her. Her milky eyes, maybe too far gone to hold his image still in their memory. The puckered skin around stitches, the sad right arm. She tapped with one long, pointed fingernail at the space where he had placed his coin on her chest out of his own god damned free will.

"In the olden days, it was very, very frowned upon to trick a leprechaun out of his lucky coin. Gold is endless, but one special coin?" The Mórrigan shook her head.

"Doesn't free will play into it? I have to give it up willingly. And considering it's the only thing keeping me alive, I'm never doing that."

Her argument fell on deaf ears because that wasn't the case any more. He was ready to be rid of the dead wife, rid of thinking of what he'd done every time he looked at her, rid himself of stupid drunken mishaps involving coin tricks in bars that served alligator soup.

He wasn't done with Odin's war, still owed the ancient one eyed bastard some favors, but he could at least rid himself of this.

"You will," the Mórrigan purred, clearly in her element. A small thing dangling in front of her, the scales of life and death hers to command. "I will give you a new body, a new life, and you, my dear Laura Moon, will give my Mad King his coin in return."

"I ain't been your king for a long time, Mhacha," he pressed on. Which was the truth. He hadn't been the Mad King in eons, not since far before he was brought to the Americas.

The queen waved a dismissive hand. "The world happens in cycles. You may be my king again some day."

Naked and fragile, the dead wife laughed, not holding back. They all looked at her. "I'm...I'm sorry." She wiped imaginary tears from her cheeks. "Just...why would you want  _him_  of all people, to be a king? This guy loses one fucking coin and he can't move on."

He started forward, riled up and ready. "I can have her stop this and leave you dead."

The Mórrigan stepped between them, stroked chilled fingers down his face and pushed him back into place. "That, little dead thing, is none of your concern."

The liquid in the pool bubbled toward the earthy soil edges before smoothing out, flat as a mirror.

The dead wife eyed it warily, crossing her arms. "What is this magic or wahtever going to do?"

"Hmmmm. You have life in you." Another nail dug into her skin over her ribs, the coin. "Even under that piece of metal your soul is still there. Which is good. We don't have souls."

"We who?"

Her green eyes turned to slits. "Humans call us all kinds of things. Fairies is demeaning. Fair folk is acceptable though we are far from fair. We're just as violent as your kind." She ran a finger down the grey and bruised flesh of the dead wife. "More so perhaps."

"Fairies...you're kidding me."

"No."

The dead wife shifted on her bare feet, now blacked with soil. "Fuck it. What are you going to do? Suck out my soul or something? I kind of like having a body."

"Nothing like that. We will offer your flesh to the pool and she will grant you a new form. It will be yours but also...a little bit of ours. But you will live, and you can live without that coin, which belongs to the Mad King. Do you understand?"

If he knew anything, it was that the dead wife was a conniving con artist who was just as selfish as she was unfeeling. But even such a creature couldn't out-con the willowy woman offering her paradise in the form of a new body.

To be honest, he didn't want to be around for a second death, one where she slowly wasted away. He had already done his part in her fate, once, twice and now a third altering time, but he wanted to forget and move on to whatever shit he could get into before the New Gods took over or Odin washed the world in blood.

Whichever came first.

"So I'll lose my...I got power or some shit when I came back with this coin in me. Will I lose that?"

"Perhaps," the Mórrigan said, tapping her chin. Her nails were quite suddenly blood red to match her lips. "I have not done this in a very long time."

" _You_." The dead wife turned dead eyes toward him. He looked at her tattered form, barely human. "You promised to take me to the god who killed me."

"Aye."

"Is that gonna change once I'm...whatever the fuck I'll be after this?"

He hesitated.

"I won't have my strength. Understand? Help me kill him."

"Killing gods is a messy business, Laura Moon," the queen crooned, though she didn't intervene. She lived off of conflict and spite.

"I'm no god. I can't kill one." He frowned and scratched his cheek. "At least not easily. We may need your boy Shadow."

They-she-had been left by him as he ran off with the gods, leaving the dead wife and the drunk leprechaun. Teamup of the century.

"As long as you'll help me," she insisted. She did not need  _him_  but she needed someone who knew this fucked up world and he was her ticket.

He had nowhere else to be and Odin would find him for another favor eventually. "Fine. I'll bring you to your second...third... _whatever_  death. Crazy bitch." He muttered that end bit and slunk back, sitting down on the damp ground and rolling a cigarette between his fingers.

The Mórrigan smiled, teeth like knives, and put her arm around the dead wife's shoulders. "There. All settled then?"

"I guess so." A shrug of a stitched shoulder.

"You will willing give over the coin?"

"Yes."

"Excellent. I do love a verbal agreement, much more satisfying than writing things  _down_ ," the queen said, turning her sharp eyes on him. "Come, you must take it from her."

"I'll die without it." "She dies without it." Their words melted together to one small but united argument.

And why the fuck didn't he want to just be rid of her? He couldn't explain it. Just like the reasons he gave the coin back after it was finally in his hands. Impossible decisions and circumstances where no answer was the right one but they just had to deal with it, pick one and move on.

The Mórrigan led the dead wife to the still pool. "Once she's under, you will take it," she instructed, her nails popping the stitches across the dead chest. Just enough to see the burned ribs, the shine of gold. "You killed her, did you not? So you must put her under."

"I've got to go in there?" He didn't like that.

"Yes. She will float and you must push her under."

"This is batshit crazy," the dead wife said. If she had breath in her, it would have hitched and shook her whole body. "I have to let you kill me again."

"Seems so, dead wife."

She pressed her lips together and nodded, stepping into the liquid. She sank in up to her ankles, then her knees. He couldn't tell if it was blood or something else. She walked until her hips were covered and then she lay back, like she was floating in a pool. She hovered near the surface, though her legs and hips weighted down enough to be mostly covered except for a spare knee cap and toe.

The Mórrigan pushed him in, fully clothed, which he protested about. "Would you rather be naked too?"

He grumbled about that and left his jacket on the soil. The liquid swallowed him up to his chest.

"This is so fucking weird," the dead wife said, a hint of fear in her voice. "If this doesn't work, I'm haunting your ass."

"Join the queue," he said, a little sadly. He put one of his hands on her breastbone, puckered, room temperature skin.

"Wait."

He did.

"When...when I lost the coin before. When I died on that street. I didn't go anywhere. I don't remember anything so it must have been just an abyss, right?"

"Doubly dead? Probably. You scared, dead wife?"

"I'm human aren't I?"

"Not for long, Laura Moon," the queen chirped from the edge of the pool.

"Don't worry, dead wife," he said, taking in a breath. "What's the worst that could happen?"

He pushed her under. She weighed nothing and his fingers found the coin easily. He held it to his palm and waded out of the pool. The liquid dripped off of him with a life of its own, leaving his clothes dry, and rejoined the rest of the pool. It took a few minutes before the surface turned to a mirror.

The Mórrigan stirred the surface with a nail and chanted in the old language and her assistants or whatever joined her. He wasn't needed for this. He'd done his part, but still he stayed, back against the moist wall, lucky coin back where it belonged. He didn't test it, juggle it around in tricks but hid it away where it should have never left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dying a second, or third, or whatever, time was strange. She was everything and nothing all at once and she could  _feel_  things. Her bones popped and blood rushed through her veins enough to give her a headache and make her long for excedrin and a cool, dark room. Her body shook off death.

Or maybe her body completely dissolved to the pool and what was left was all new, fresh.

She was nothing but wayward thoughts until everything crashed down all at once. She crashed through the underbrush of her mind, like crawling out of another grave, and gasped in metallic air. Her lungs struggled with the newness but someone cradled her like she was a child and she was so out of it that she let them.

She coughed and breathed and gripped with fingers she slowly began to  _feel_  with. She'd been dead and numb for what felt like years that it was almost painful to have everything back. Hearing came next, her ears painfully rippling until all she could hear was a soothing, sharp voice speaking gibberish. And then her eyes….god she was able to see. Blurry at first, but it came to her.

Damp soil with flecks of white. A soft white shoulder covered in black fabric. Pale faces all around her.

"Holy shit."

Her eyes snapped to the sound. And there he was, the fucker who had everything to do with all of her deaths. He looked different in full color, but it was far from a bad thing.

She wanted to retort, but only coughed, her body not ready.

"Shhhh." The woman who had done this, given her new life, smoothed long fingers over her hair, holding her to her breast like she needed comfort. "It will take a moment to get adjusted, Laura Moon."

Her name. It sang in her ears.

She'd never felt like this before, even before her first death. Had she ever truly been alive if that's what this was?

One of the pale faces offered her a long black...robe? Blanket? Whatever it was, it was soft but her skin screamed against the contact anyway. She used hands, that looked like her hands but felt like something else, shaking and weak to grip the fabric around her, ignoring the cries of pain.

The Mórrigan helped her stand, the woman towering over her much like the  _Mad King_ -she'd be laughing about that if her brain wasn't all a pile of mush right now-did. They were standing in what had once been that pool. But it was all...gone. It was all  _her_.

"Fuck," was the first word she muttered with her new lungs, new tongue, new lips. Her voice still sounded like her, which calmed her briefly.

"Hmmmm." The woman's hands on her shoulders was tight but reassuring. "It'll take many more rabbits and cats and rats sacrificed for me to fill that up again." She sighed, regretfully. "But I have done my part, haven't I, Mad King?"

"She looks alive to me," he said. Hell on a stick, her ears trilled with his accent and she hated herself and her new body a little bit just then. "Been a while since I've seen magic that strong. Didn't know it could still be done."

The Mórrigan smiled a wicked smile. "Witches have survived centuries and we will thrive for centuries more until the world burns."

He tucked an unlit cigarette behind his ear. "Is that uh…"

"You'll stay with us for some time," the queen, the witch said. "We have to talk and Laura Moon has to adjust to her new body."

He said nothing and followed them through dark passages that eventually changed from soil to wood to stone. Then stairs and doors.

The light in the home was from candles, soft light, but it still burned. She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to take in all of the marvels she'd been missing since her eyes started to go.

"You will be bathed and rested," the Mórrigan told her and handed her off to two slight and pale girls who smelled like the air after a spring rainshower. "They will take care of you."

Her feet ached from the walk, and she let the two girls-fairies-take her to a room that was blissfully dim. She felt them wash her skin and gave her a soft nightgown. She'd never be caught dead in something so dowdy but she couldn't give two shits about it now.

The bed was painful, all pins and needles until her skin adjusted and it turned to pillows of feathers and clouds.

She slept for the first time since she died but her dreams were nonsensical. She wasn't scared or happy in them, but she gobbled up sleep like a glutton.

Days could have passed and she didn't know. When she woke next, she was so ravenous she almost threw up but her stomach was empty, fresh, new. The two girls, who never gave their names, offered her clothes.

She took them, and looked in one of the silver mirrors in the hall as they walked. She looked...well she looked like herself. The best version of herself. Tiny imperfections gone. Things were just a millimeter to the left, off-kilter, not quite Laura Moon but not not Laura Moon.

"Can I eat any of this?" The house was packed with food just laying about. No flies buzzed around her any more, no flies settled on the foods.

One of the girls with silver hair shrugged. "You are...not quite human. But the Mórrigan has a meal waiting for you. It would be rude to eat before you reach her table."

Her stomach growled in protest and they walked quickly.

The house was white and golden. Everything was gilded and plush. Extravagance dripped off of every chair, every mantle, every table.

They walked to the patio where they'd first entered the estate. This time it had a small round table and cushioned chairs around. The Mórrigan was already seated, dressed in her dark shadows, sipping from a bronze goblet.

He was there too, cleaned up and face healed from whatever fucked it up in the first place. His eyebrows perked up and his eyes followed her to the table.

"How are you feeling, Laura Moon?" the woman asked, leaning forward. Long nails dug into the skin around her knee, but she welcomed the sparks of pain. They were new and fresh and she accepted all of it.

"Like I could eat a horse or two," she said, instantly reaching for the food at the table. She couldn't stop herself. She bit into bread and tasted yeast and flour and not ash and she almost cried.

She ate and the others did as well, though with less ferver. No one spoke, though the air was filled with music and voices from inside. Once she finally had her fill and sat back, she took a cup of wine with her, nestling it in her hands, against her blissfully smooth chest with no sutures pushed through dead flesh.

"Fuck, I'm gonna have to keep you fed on the road," he muttered into whatever he was drinking. It looked white. Milk? She didn't bother asking. "You are the biggest pain in my arse, dead wife."

She swallowed a gulp of wine. "I'm not dead anymore."

"Shit."

"You can call me resurrected wife if you want but doesn't have quite the same ring to it." Bold, she sat forward and snatched the poorly rolled cigarette from behind his ear. Lifting a candle from the middle of the table, she lit the end.

God that was good.

Being dead had  _sucked_.

"She has a name," the Mórrigan mused, leaning against the table. "You could call her such. Humans have nothing against the use of their names."

She tried thinking of anything she knew about fairies but honestly she couldn't think of anything but Tinkerbell. She knew nothing of their customs, their magic, their rules. Maybe she should start learning now that she wasn't entirely human.

He made a face like the queen had asked him to eat a pile of cow shit. "I'd rather not."

She let out an impressive line of smoke. "You could just call me wife, if you're so against names."

He almost, quite honestly, choked on his drink. "I'd rather call you bitch."

She shrugged slender shoulders that weren't stitched together. "You're not wrong." She took another drag and blew it in his face. A smile twitchd into place on her own.

She felt more like herself than she had since she was a kid. She was finally  _feeling_  again. Gone was the numbness, the indifference. And sure, as a hint of amusement flourished in her chest, she realized this was a bad, shitty thing, that it would lead her down roads she should not go, and all the shit she'd done was bound to catch up with her, but fuck.

 _She was alive_. She'd take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> May, possibly depending on how s2 goes in the show, write a second part to this. Because my whole purpose of making Laura alive again was so she and Sweeney could fuck sooooo I'll probably make a second part in a few months!


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to 1) not write this part until mid S2, and 2) once I started writing it, post it after 2 more episodes of the show. HOWEVER, I ended up writing a good chunk of this and then having to rewrite it as things were released for the new season. I'm posting it now so it doesn't clash too much with season 2 as it airs and I hope you all still like it!
> 
> You can think of this fic as the other side of the coin from part one: part one was whimsical and flowery, and part two is kind of nitty and gritty and raw.
> 
> I added certain elements from the book which I believe may be happening this season a little bit, so kudos to you if you catch all my little nods toward the source material.
> 
> Warning, there may be typos but I've been rereading and catching typos for like three days and I'm just tired.

The woman with black hair in a black dress kissed her forehead when they left. There was something sad and motherly in the woman's voice, her eyes, her red stained lips cold against new, living flesh.

"I have a feeling I'll be seeing you again, Laura Moon," the Mórrigan said.

"I think I'll skip the ritual bath if we do," she replied, garnering a small smile from the other woman. Her boots, the only pieces of clothes that hadn't been tossed into a fireplace after her resurrection, crunched against the fresh grass on the way to the awaiting black car. It was nondescript, just another set of wheels, up-to-date plates and that's all she needed to get where she was going.

She got behind the wheel and yanked the seat up with the pull bar under the front. Her magical rebirth hadn't given her any extra height. She tilted the rearview and saw clear, brown eyes looking back at her.

She half expected to wake up dead somewhere, sure this was some trick or some dream.

Blinking and shaking her head, she pushed the mirror back where it belonged and glanced toward the white house on the green hill. Her...companion, her meal ticket, her unconventional guide through this fucked up cluster of gods and magic was still standing there with the woman in black.

Wrinkling her nose, she blared down on the horn, not letting up until the pair split and he yelled an, "All right! Knock it the fuck off!"

The woman disappeared into the house without looking back for another farewell. Maybe that was a human thing.

Behind the wheel, she shrugged a blissfully stitch-free shoulder and pushed the car into drive the second the side door shut.

"Think you'd be a little more grateful for what I just did for you," he said, pushing his seat as far back as it would go to give his legs space.

The car purred onto the nearest street and the sky bled with the morning sun low in the sky. "You didn't do it for me," she said, eyes on the road. She rolled down her window and let the breeze whip against her face. Every sensation was tenfold and every color was technicolor and she wanted to experience everything anew. Maybe she'd actually appreciate it this time around.

He scoffed, pulling a cigarette out from behind his ear and rolling down his own window. "You're right, I did it for me, my coin, my luck." He patted his chest as if he'd hidden his coin in there like she had.

She pressed her lips into a line. "And now you don't have to feel guilty about killing me." Glancing over, she blinked and the soft expression on his face disappeared into a scowl. She didn't say anything else.

The cab filled with fresh air and smoke and they drove west. He cautioned her against using highways before he crashed out in his seat. She turned up the crackling radio and drove. There were farms for hours, broken up by small towns here and there. A river sparkled next to the road for a few miles before she stopped to pee and fill up on gas. They're been driving all day, from the middle of New Hampshire to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

She came back to the car with foods filled with saturated fats and sugars and excess sodium. Her fingers turned orange from her childhood favorite.

"Turn here," he said suddenly, reaching for the wheel.

She slapped his hand away and was disappointed when she did no more damage to him than she did during her first life. Her strength, whatever the coin had done to keep her alive, was gone. "Where are we going?"

"Got a stop near Ithaca."

"What the fuck. That's way out of the way. And in the  _opposite_  fucking direction."

"It's a favor to the Mórrigan," he said, by way of convincing her. As if he hadn't just slept through her navigation needs and resulted in extra hours tacked onto their trip.

She turned down the northbound street, glanced back west. "I can't see Shadow anymore." He didn't speak, so she kept going. "When I was dead, everything was grey and black. But Shadow was...this beacon of light. I could see him even all the way across the country, a trick of light on the horizon."

"He may be your light, but he's Wednesday's man now. I told you that."

"I know." Her grip on the wheel turned her knuckles white. That was part of the reason she wanted to kill that god; for taking Shadow and for having her killed. "But at least when I could see him, I knew when you were leading me off the trail."

"And why would I do that...undead wife?"

She arched an eyebrow. "I thought you were going to call me  _bitch_  from now on?"

"I'm saving that for special occasions." He flicked the stubby remains of a cigarette out the window.

She couldn't stop one side of her mouth twitching up in amusement. Thankfully not her right side. He didn't see. "What's in Ithaca?"

"Got a message to leave on a doorstep. Won't take long."

"Yeah, except the extra few hours it takes to get there and back. And I'm gonna have to go on the highway to get there."

"No, you won't." He stretched as much as he could manage in the seat. One of the springs in the backrest  _pinged_.

"Fine." She reached forward and turned up the radio and rolled down the back windows and let the spring air grapple for a hold on her hair, clawing at her for a piece of the new life she'd been given.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They didn't hit traffic, but the side roads tacked on at least another hour on the two hour trip to the outskirts of the city. The sky was starting to get dark. The wax sealed envelope inside his jacket nearly burned against his skin; a warning, a memory.

"This have anything to do with the whole war thing?" she asked as they got closer, creeping through suburbs.

"It might."

"Do you ever have a straight answer for anything?"

"Yes." He gave her a shit-eating grin and pointed her toward his destination.

She wrinkled her nose as she stopped the car at the curb, leaning over the wheel and peering out the windshield. "A cemetery, really?" She flopped back into the seat.

"Don't take it personal, undead wife." He hauled himself out the tiny car. "Stay here."

"I'm hungry!"

"I don't care." He leaned down, resting his arms in the open window.

"I'm alive again, I need to eat."

"Do whatever the fuck you want then. But if you run off, know I'll just find you again. Coin or no coin."

He jabbed a finger in the air for emphasis before leaving. She drove off immediately, flipping him off briefly before disappearing around a bend. Making his way toward the gated entrance, the murky dark sky an omen.

Crows cawed loudly from skeletal branches on trees. Maybe one of them was a raven, but they didn't speak to him. He rolled his shoulders and lit a cigarette. Boots crunched over the gravel pathways as he meandered through gravestones. Some were new, sharp edged like knives in the night, some were so old they crumbled under the lightest breeze.

The small funeral home at the back of the lot was nothing compared to Ibis and Jacquel, but it would do. He stepped up to the door; not the public ones that opened wide enough for two to walk through at once, but the smaller one round back, with a bag of trash by the slab of concrete just big enough for one person to stand.

He dropped the snub of his cigarette under his boot and ground it into the soft soil.

The paint was peeling on the door. Pieces flaked off and floated down when he rapt a knuckle against it. He knocked again and heard a muffled voice from inside. One more time, and the voice came directly from the other side. Noting the small peep hole, he leaned down and gave a grin to the man on the other side.

"Heya Tommy, let me in, will ya?"

"Hell no. Fuck off, Sweeney." The accent was a lilting Scottish and the voice was old and pissed.

He leaned against the door frame. "Not a chance. Sorry, mate."

Grumbling ensued from the other side of the door. "Don't want no part in that god damned war you're wrapped up in."

"I'm not here about that." Possibly a lie, but he didn't know the exact contents of the letter in his pocket. He slipped his hand in and pulled the thick envelope out. The seal shone bright red even in the darkening light. "I just saw Mhacha."

The grumbling stopped. A lock slid over. The door cracked open, revealing an average looking middle aged man, greying hair, dressed in a green sweater and brown pants. His water blue eyes settled on the letter. "Is that from her?"

He nodded and invited himself in. Once inside, after ducking under short doorways, he leaned against the back of the worn couch and handed over the letter.

"Ain't thought of any of this in a long time, Sweeney," Tommy said, hands shaking as he popped the seal. The entire room held its breath as he peeled back the paper and read what was there.

"What's it say?" he finally asked, prying the information from the shorter man. Half of his mind was conscious of the trouble the undead wife could get into on her own. He reached forward for the letter.

Tommy snatched it away. "This is not for the likes of you, Mad Sweeney."

Eyebrows raised. "That so? You're so forgotten that you forgot your own name two centuries ago. What's it say? Is she offering you a place to stay? Is it about the war?"

Tommy tucked the letter under his arm. "Not everything is about you or your war."

"It is  _not_  my war. This is Odin's business."

"Yet he has you under his thumb. You might as well be a house cleaning brownie, old friend."

He pulled himself up to his full height and sucked in a breath to go off. Instead, he swallowed it down and shrugged, slapping a grin on his face. "Say what you like, but I found Mhacha when you couldn't."

"It ain't a competition."

"The whole world's a competition, Tommy." His duty done, he patted the Scottsman on the shoulder. "See ya on the other side."

"Sweeney!" Tommy called out just as he ducked out into the night. "For what it's worth, I hope you don't die."

"Me too, friend, me too." He tugged the old door closed and hooked his fingers in his belt loops. Now he had to find himself an undead wife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprisingly (probably to him) she was waiting where she'd left him, having cut and run from the nearest diner with a back seat full of emptied wallets.

"We needed cash," she said with a shrug of her shoulders when he spotted them. Shaking his head, he gathered them up and tossed the cashless fake leather out onto the parking lot of the diner as they whipped past.

"You know, we  _could_  just sell your gold," she said, half an hour later after they'd visited the classic golden arches and the cab smelled of fake meat and salt. She shoved fries in her face as she drove. "But I couldn't find a pawn shop. Or one of those," she hitched her voice up, mimicking the annoying tv commercials, " _we buy your gold and give you_ _ **cold hard cash**_  places."

He responded with a grunt and finished off another atrocious burger.

"You got a stash of money anywhere else?" she prodded, not liking this silent version of him.

"No, I don't."

"Then don't complain about my ideas. We need food and gas and a place to sleep. Unless you want to drive."

"I'm not driving."

"Fine." She scowled at the road as they drove back the way they'd come, back toward the Pennsylvania border. "What crawled up your ass and died?"

With a snap of his lighter, he lit another cigarette. She waved her hand, offering two fingers and he rolled his eyes but put it there. She took a drag. Still good. Everything was so much better now that she was living.

Hell, even sharing  _space_  with someone felt decidedly more electric. Even if that someone was her murderer.

"When you get to be my age…"

"Ancient?"

"Fuck you." He took his cigarette back. "When you get my age and visit old friends, it's like visiting your nan in a home and she's sorta there but not really, y'know? She thinks you're her sibling instead of a grand kid. It's a bloody fucking shame knowing what they used to be."

She frowned and glanced over at him. "Sorry," she said finally.

He slouched down in the seat and fell asleep once his cigarette was nothing but ash.

She kept the radio going, the windows down, enjoying even the smell of the farms and old industry buildings around her. Unfortunately, being  _alive_  meant that she also got tired. And driving, while boring as shit, sapped energy like a mosquito. It wasn't long before she nearly dozed off, jerked back onto the street and decided to find a place to stay.

They hadn't even made it out of New York yet.

It was harder with no maps, no phones, but she managed to find a few signs and pulled into the lot. It looked like a family run place, not a chain. She punched him on the shoulder to wake him and then went to get a room with crumpled bills in her hands.

The kid working didn't ask for a license or a credit card to put on file, thank fuck. She handed him sixty-three dollars for a single room and took the key that was an actual key and not one of those digital cards.

"You get us the honeymoon suite, undead wife?" he called from where he leaned against the grill of the car.

"Don't think this means anything," she said, grabbing the bag from the backseat of the car. A care package from the Mórrigan, it had sets of clothes for them both but no cash. Locking the doors, she led to the way to the room that was at the end of the building, sharing just a single wall with the room next door. She wrinkled her nose as she fiddled with the doorknob. It was gonna be cold if one wall just soaked up the night air.

The door stuck and she had to finally shoulder it open while he watched with interest but made no move to help. She flicked on the lights, showing a pretty typical two bed room. Small table and two chairs by the window, covered in thick white curtains. An ancient TV two feet thick sat atop a real wood dresser and two painting prints hung above the beds.

It smelled clean and didn't have a single noticeable stain on the floor or covers.

"Not exactly five star," he said, kicking the door shut, "but it'll do."

Not caring, she dropped the bag of clothes on the table and dove for one of the beds. It was that typical hard-yet-soft hotel bed. She was exhausted, and picking pockets in her new skin felt alien. She'd almost gotten caught and the excitement zapped a good portion of her energy.

With effort she yanked off her boots, shimmied out of the pants the Mórrigan had given her-not exactly ignoring the feeling of his eyes on her as she did so but too tired to care or take it farther-and then struggled to get under the covers.

"Why do hotels tuck in their sheets so fucking much," she muttered as she struggled, finally getting a side free and sinking under. She let out a sigh of contentment, pulled the sheet and thin blanket over her head and curled up on her side in a tiny ball.

She was asleep within seconds.

She dreamed of thin black dogs and blood red skies and woke up with a jolt. She wasn't sweaty and hectic, but cold and stiff, like something had been sitting on her chest, eating away her restful sleep.

A snore from the other bed rattled her into the present and she propped herself up on her elbows. The alarm clock on the nightstand said 5:47AM.

The other bed was completely overwhelmed with the world's tallest leprechaun sprawled across it on his stomach, head shoved into a pillow.

She didn't think he could wake up easily, so she got up, pulled on pants and boots, grabbed what was left of the cash from her last night sticky fingers and left. She drove farther than she had to to find a donut shop that was open. She ordered two big coffees and six donuts because she couldn't help but savor everything she tasted. She sat at the window and drank half the sweet and bitter coffee and nibbled each of the donuts before gobbling up the chocolate glazed in its entirety.

Once seven o'clock eased itself onto the analog clock on the wall, she took the remaining breakfast and drove back to the hotel. The room was damp with steam from the shower and she toed off her boots, plopping the bag of donuts on the table just as he walked out of the bathroom, hair damp and eskew, a hilariously small hotel towel wrapped around his waist.

He saw her and stopped like a deer in the forest. She blinked and looked and didn't hate it one bit.

"I bought breakfast," she said, breaking the silence and waving at the table.

He grunted; either he wasn't a morning person or he was still upset over whatever happened last night when she left him alone in that boneyard. In any case, she grabbed the bag of clean clothes from the table and picked out a few random things before swapping places with him. She unabashedly looked at the muscles of his back, beads of water trickling down his spine.

"Hey!" He pulled open the bag. "Did you take a bite out of every one of these fucking things?" He twisted and looked at her with disdain.

She lifted her hands in a cartoonish shrug. "Whoops." She rushed into the muggy bathroom, slamming it shut and muffling his exclamations. She laughed despite herself and peered at the shelves. One measly towel left, barely anything left in the mini shampoo and soap containers. "Thanks a lot, fucker," she muttered before she shrugged off her clothes.

She hadn't had much of a chance to really take in and explore her new body. She knew she looked like herself: petite, round face, brown eyes, small tits, boney hips, but that was just who she was, how she'd always been. But she had yet to run her hands over the flesh that was now hers.

She hopped into the shower and turned on the water almost too hot. She was surprised for a moment how short the showerhead was and wondered how the hell he'd even managed to get wet in here.

Dragging fingers over her scalp, her body got shivers from the heat of the water. Her nerves were all fresh and unaffected by her three decades of living. Her nipples got hard when she ran her hands over them and her inner thighs trembled with a single touch.

God, she'd been so busy being dead she'd forgotten what it felt like to  _want_  things. And right now she desperately wanted sex. How strange would it be to have sex in a new body? Would it be like the first time all over again?

Fuck she hoped not, her first few times were shit and there was just a small window in which she enjoyed it before her depression made everything a chore, a bland choice to eat up time and try to feel something. It never worked.

Without the water running in the room, the silence was almost as suffocating as the fog. She stepped out and walked, dripping wet, to the light switch to flick on the fan. The white noise was enough. She dried herself, wrung out her hair and could not stop thinking about the ache between her legs.

"This is such a shit idea, Laura," she muttered to her blurred out reflection as she wrapped the towel around her hair. At home, she could spent twenty minutes getting ready post shower, but they had nothing here for her to waste time with.

It would not be her first shit idea, and it definitely wouldn't be her last.

Instead, she pulled on the clothes in the bag as a way of trying to convince herself out of her idea. T-shirt, check. What she'd thought were pants ended up being a skirt, naturally. She laughed when she held it up and smothered her mouth with her free hand.

She may as well walk out completely naked.

There was another piece of clothing she'd hastily grabbed. Another t-shirt. A very-much-not-her-size-and-definitely-for-a-man t-shirt.

"Yet another sign," she muttered. She pulled her hair out of the towel and tossed the fabric over the curtain rod before pulling on the shirt. It could practically be a dress. For good measure, in case this went horribly wrong, she pulled on fresh panties and stared at herself in the now-clear mirror.

She tilted her head side to side to make sure it was really her that was standing there. This was her life now.

"Shit," she muttered before going for the door.

He was sitting at the tiny table near the window, flipping through channels because there was never anything good on, especially at hotels, especially in the morning. She marched right up to him, blocking his view. A complaint was halfway out his mouth when she grabbed what she could of his shirt and pulled him to meet her in a kiss, harsh and startling.

It startled her more than him perhaps, her body jolting painfully from the  _new_  sensation. She shoved him back and slapped him without thinking, as if he'd been the one to jump her bones instead of the other way around.

"What the bloody hell are you doing?" He held her away from him, hands around her upper arms, remote fallen to the carpeted floor.

She had already thought this through enough. Well, just enough. Maybe not enough. It didn't matter. "This body is brand new. Everything I see, or hear, or do is new. I want to have sex with you."

Blink. Beat. Blink. "What?"

"You've never thought of it before?"

"You've been a corpse for the whole time I've known you."

She frowned, leaned back a bit. "So you don't want to have to sex with me?"

"I don't make it a habit of sleeping with other men's wives," he said, completely serious.

"I'm no one's wife. Death did us part." She dug her nails into his shoulders and he didn't seem to notice.

"You had no problem being Shadow's wife when you were a corpse."

"I was depressed as fuck when I was married to Shadow. Everything is different now."

"Yeah?" He shoved her back. "Good for you."

She probably should have accepted this and gone and finished getting dressed. But she felt like she might very well explode if she didn't find a willing cock  _somewhere_  soon. "A blowjob then? It's what I'm known for," she added wickedly, knowing that Wednesday, Odin, the prick, had passed around that nugget of information like candy. Not exactly what she wanted to be famous for as a kid, but she'd take it.

"You're known for chomping 'em right off, undead wife," he said, shaking his head. "I quite like my cock where it is, thanks."

Frustration throttled her deep in her chest. She cleared her throat. "I'll make it worth your while?"

He sighed and rubbed his face. She wasn't really used to men turning down sex. It had been her easy manipulation ever since fourteen, in the boy's room at high school during biology block.

"I'll let you fuck me however you want, whenever you want." God she was desperate and it was  _pathetic_ , but the words kept pouring out like a badly written porno. "I'll even pretend to be...I dunno, one of those mermaids or whatever the fuck you were talking about before. Look, my hair's wet and everything."

"That's not the problem, undead wife," he said again, always reminding her.

So she'd screwed around while her husband was in prison. So what! That was literally a different life. "I'm no one's wife," she repeated. "I don't think marriage licenses cover death and magical resurrection. And Shadow…" She'd thought about it a lot on the drive here. Now that Shaodw wasn't the one thing keeping her going, the one thing that made her heart beat, it was like all of her love with him was severed. He meant something to her, but it wasn't the same.

Shaking her head, she stepped forward, gripped his hand and pressed it against her chest, his fingers fitting between her ribs, his palm over her breast, heavy beating heart underneath. "Just fuck me. I gave you your coin back, you owe me."

He didn't. They both knew it.

He opened his mouth, hesitated, let out a breath, tried again. Failed miserably and shook his head. "You need to work on your pitch." He pulled her between his legs and she kissed him again.

It was strange kissing someone with a body that didn't quite feel hers. It was strange to kiss someone she didn't really know. It was strange as hell to kiss someone who had killed her, but she pushed those pesky new thoughts aside and let herself be swallowed up by the golden coils deep in her core, the sensation of being touched by hands that weren't small and lithe and belonging to docile fairies living in a white house on a hill.

She pressed him back, the chair creaking, hands fisted in his hair because she'd long forgotten how to be soft. He circled her hips with his hands, dragged nails down her back, sending jolts of hot and cold through her.

She couldn't even keep track of every sensation, feeling tattered and electric all at once.

And he didn't hold back. He kissed her like he was going off to war, massive hands circling her waist almost entirely, pulling her into his lap. She repealed by biting his bottom lip and tightening her legs, rocking her hips and nearly knocking the seat back. Her shirt fisted in his hand and he gripped her ass and sucked on her neck and it felt so fucking good she swore there were fireworks in her chest.

While he said no cocks in her mouth, he'd said nothing of her hands and she made easy work of button and zipper and found herself not at all disappointed. He didn't find her so revolting it would seem.

Labored breathing and muttered "fucks" filled the sleepy hotel room.

"Ah, you're not so bad, undead wife," he said, unable to shake whatever obsession he had with naming her and using it as frequently as one used commas in sentences.

She yanked his head back, circled her other, tiny in comparison, hand around his throat. "Don't talk to me," she instructed, as if she held all the cards and it wasn't his hands that lifted her then, like she weighed nothing.

Her back found the wall and his hands found her inner thigh and pushed aside her panties and then his cock into her. She gasped like she'd been stabbed and scrambled for something to hold but found only his shoulders, which she gripped with miniature crushing strength.

She held his hips hostage between her thighs and wished for her superior strength to find leverage on the wall but found he was doing a fine job extracting primitive moans from her tingling, bruised lips. Neighbors be damned.

The man had stamina, she'd give him that, and she'd also give him the bruises she'd sure to have on her back in a few hours. The wall turned into the edge of the bureau and she nearly tipped the TV right off in her haste to not fall to the ground because it wasn't that she didn't trust him to keep a hold on her, she just didn't trust him period.

He kissed and thrust and that poor TV teetered on the edge of the furniture. She gasped and panted and cursed and probably called out to the wrong god but it didn't seem to deter him.

Her new self twisted and coiled and tangled and gave in quicker than she'd wanted, but it was god damned glorious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They didn't talk until they were in the car, save for a "You're not bad yourself, for a leprechaun," which didn't sting as much as she'd probably liked.

She'd made a convincing argument and gotten what she'd wanted out of it. It was a fine fuck, she was good for a human, though she was a tiny, barely there thing. He refused the wheel and acted as half-assed navigator as they started off, cheap sunglasses over both of their eyes, snatched from the last gas station she'd stopped at.

A good hour passed. He scrunched down as much as he could in the damned small seat and flicked cigs out the window and tried to knock away the words rattling around in his head. the Mórrigan's voice was like a parasite that kept coming back, unwelcome.

_It may look like we're strong here, but that magic I used for that dead thing? I don't know if I can get it back. I won't fade away, but my spirit is changing. Like yours. Can't you feel it?_

The undead wife broke his brooding by turning up a surprisingly clear radio station. Piano. One-of-a-kind voice.

"Queen not your type?" she asked, peering over at him through a veil of hair.

"I like 'em fine."

She cranked the volume to crackling heights and started singing along, stumbling here or there like one is wont to do. He found himself singing along too, against his will, to the perfectly ironic lyrics.

_And bad mistakes_  
_I've made a few_  
_I've had my share of sand kicked in my face  
_ _But I've come through_

On and on it went, nothing but wind and road and sun and Queen.

Straight out of a fucking movie script it was.

Once the song was over, she turned the station down a bit and settled back and opened her mouth, uncharacteristically not-mean words pouring out. "I peg you for...Metallica? No no no, that's too square on the nose. Mumford & Sons. Because  _Irish_. No? Okay. Spice Girls!" And then she laughed, truly laughed, for the first time in a very long time.

"Hmmm. Life looks good on you."

She swallowed her laugh and pushed hair away from her face. "Thanks." Pause. "You're looking pretty rough. Have a tough morning?"

He was pretty sure he'd have indents from her nails in his skin for days. "We shouldn't make a habit of that."

"Jeez. What do you want from me? I'm alive, I'm horny, you're here."

Layers of guilt, peeled back like onions. He blamed Wednesday rustling up all the gods, making him feel old, tired, annoyed. It wasn't like anyone could flip a switch and make humans suddenly believe more in ancient than they did in modern. No matter that the  _plan_  was to take out the old man, he himself could die just as easy as any other god, couldn't he? Bullet to the brain, stab to the heart, head lobbed off. And maybe he'd be reborn somewhere, but probably not. Who needed luck when you had the world at your fingertips on a screen.

"Earth to Sweeney," she jolted him out of his meandering thoughts. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

What  _was_  wrong with him? He shook his head and handled another cigarette, flicking open his lighter. He was a bitter bastard, but he wasn't the depressed type. the Mórrigan dug her darkness into him and sending him to Tommy was a low fucking blow. He took a drag and continued a previous conversation. "Nothing. And your cunt's just fine, undead wife. The rest of you," he waved a hand from head to foot hidden by the pedals, "could use some work."

She scowled. "My body is literally magic. Fuck off."

He grinned and smoke filled the cab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was like the spring break she never had as a teeanger. A roadtrip across the country. Six hours a day on the road at best. Scattered hotel rooms. Fucking every night and sometimes in the morning because why the fuck not? It became, frighteningly, as easy as breathing. Drive, banter, fuck, sleep. Hell, they even started  _sleeping_  together, the warmth of their bodies mingling after that one damned hotel that only had a single bed in their room.

The first time he said her name, he was deep inside of her and it shocked her so much, those five letters wrapped around his soft accent, whispered into her ear, that she  _stopped,_ frozen in place.

"What?" she'd gasped out, breathing hard, sweat pooling in the dip in her clavicle.

"What?" he'd echoed, pulling his face away from the slope of her neck, not realizing what he'd said or not caring.

Her mouth hung open. She pushed aside the emotional brick wall and grabbed his face, kissing him hard.

She cried in the shower later, the soft water from the faucet washing the tears away before they could make themselves known. She didn't know why she cried. Maybe because she felt like a person for the first time in a very long time. Maybe because the fairies had it right about someone's name. It was a powerful thing.

Nights later, because everything took longer when you drove on backroads and they always ended up in a hotel room earlier than they really needed to, as if they'd been doing it their whole lives, they nestled together under the sheets, his arm circling her, her arm tossed across his chest, fingers working circles across his skin.

"I was a god once," he said suddenly. It was between midnight and two in the morning, one of those times that worked hard-said information out of someone easier than during any other time. The veil was thin, they'd say. Truths could move more freely.

She was so tired; driving was a bitch and he still wouldn't take over. She didn't know why he thought she deserved to be the only one putting in the work in getting them closer to Cairo, Illinois. It was probably a day or two away, depending how early they retired to a hotel room to kiss and touch and fuck.

" _You_? You want me to believe you were a king and a god? Do you have the world's biggest ego to go along with the rest of you?" Her eyes drooped shut but it didn't matter. Their room didn't point toward the street and was nearly pitch black with the lights off and no leaking light from street lamps.

"You know how old I am?"

"Ancient," she sighed against his skin. She wanted to sleep but she was also keenly aware that this was important.

"Does it bother you?"

"What do you think?" She laughed meanly, but he didn't reply. She shifted, propping her head up on his chest, fist tucked under her chin. She couldn't really see him, but the effort was enough. "No, it doesn't bother me. You clearly learned some tricks in all those centuries."

He squeezed her hip. "Oh definitely. Ain't afraid to admit that this Irish sexy did not come naturally, it took much cultivation and testing."

"Okay, pig. And how old are you exactly? You want to tell me."

It was quiet and she thought maybe he'd fallen asleep but he spoke eventually. "Three thousand," he said like a rush of air leaving his body. "Give or take a century. God of Luck and all, takes the concept to create the god."

She breathed slowly out of her nose. It was too much to think about right now and her brain struggled, but she made sure to remember this because it was important. She could tell, deep down inside, that it was. Why else would he tell her?

"Definitely a cradle robber," she mused.

"Grave robber, more like."

She planted a kiss with teeth on his chest knowing, even without the light, that his skin was marked with red from her fingertips. She slid to the cooler side of the bed and curled herself up like a cat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They made it to Cairo the next day. Nestled as far south in Illinois as possible, it was an average Mid-West town. He'd seen a lot of them in his years of wandering the countryside, coast to coast, finding the occasional pocket of believers in the beginning. True belief was dry as dust now.

"So what's the plan?" she asked once they passed the entrance sign, welcoming them with metal and reflective letters.

"We're not here to kill Wednesday," he said, flicking the remnants of a cigarette out the window. He hunched forward, squinting out the windshield. The town went about its business, having no idea that gods were amongst them.  _Humans_.

"What? Why the fuck not? You promised." Her words were sharp, and he had a feeling she wanted to hurt him bad. Not out of longing but out of anger. She'd been so damn cheerful since coming out of the Mórrigan's pool, and now she let her true colors shine.

"Don't you want to find out his plan first?"

"I don't give two shits about his plan."

"He won't be alone. There will be other gods here. We need to get him alone, or at least have a weapon to take him down with."

"This is America. We can buy a gun from a corner store."

He shook his head, rubbing his face, nails scratching through his beard. "He's a shifty bastard, it might not take."

"Then why the fuck are we here?"

"Just trust me on this."

"Our little arrangement isn't built on trust." Her hands gripped the steering wheel. A week ago, they could have torn it apart, but now it didn't even creak below her tiny hands.

"Aye," he muttered and then pointed. "There." The black and white house sporting an embalming room in the basement stood nestled against a forest.

She pulled the car up and shoved it into park. "I've been here before."

"Figured it was their work that sewed you up last time," he said, though he hadn't thought about it before. The air was warm when he got out of the car, stretching his arms and shaking his legs out from the cramped quarters.

She found her way to his side, popping out a hip and crossing her arms, unconvinced. "Why is everyone coming here?"

"These African gods? They're older than any of us. If Wednesday can get them on his side...well, the war's all but won." He motioned for her to follow, which she did. The tall, bespectacled Mr. Ibis answered their knock.

"Mr. Sweeney," the god said, his voice smooth and powerful. "And Laura Moon. Alive?"

"It's a long story," he said, nodding toward the inside of the house. "Anyone else here?"

Ibis focused on the undead woman beside him for elongated seconds before answering. "Yes. They're all in the barn. Out back. We'll be meeting there shortly." And shut the door in their face.

He banged once on the door out of anger before stepping away and weaving his way through the trees.

"I have a feeling we're not supposed to be here," she said, struggling to keep up with his steps, stumbling over roots and rocks under the thick pine underbrush.

"Wednesday doesn't have the same authority here as the House on the Rock. He can't stop us this time."

"That's reassuring," she muttered before stumbling again and cursing.

He contemplated giving her a hand, then thought better of it. The barn came into focus like a dream. It wasn't any old barn, made of red wood and black tar. It was made of stones, worn and mossy with old school sand and water grout and a patched up wooden roof. There was a gaping hole in the side where a door sat open, big enough to allow horses to walk in, heads held high.

He didn't have to duck under, stepping inside and letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. There was a whole number of things inside; junk by the looks of it, scattered pieces of history. No animals. A huge table in the center, made out of what looked like the heart of an ancient tree. He rubbed his chest at the discomfortable tightening underneath.

"Laura?" Of course Shadow fucking Moon was here already. The man, who'd been talking with Wednesday and Anubis, spotted his undead wife, face lighting up like a boy on Christmas morning.

"Hey, puppy," she replied, her smile pale in comparison.

He clenched his jaw and stalked out of the way, into a shadow, jamming a cig between his lips and lighting it. His eyes flickered between Shadow and Odin.

"You look…" Shadow said, completely over his head. What did Wednesday want with this dumb slab?

"Alive? Yeah." She held her arms out to the sides and glanced down, as if inspected her new form. Her hair covered the remnants of blurred bruises on her neck and the purple on her back was nearly gone, yellowy and unseen under her shirt.

Wednesday looked pissed. He half expected a bolt of lightning or some shit to come through the roof. Odin gripped the old school drinking horn in his hand but it didn't bust. Mismatched eyes found his in the shadows and beckoned him.

"I don't believe this," Anubis said, walking toward the reunited couple. "I did not foresee it."

She shrugged. "Magic," is all she said. "The next time I die, you'll be the first call I make."

Anubis stepped into her space and pushed and poked her, testing how alive she really was. She slapped his hands away with human strength. "I would like to exam you."

She rolled her eyes and waved a hand. "Whatever. I was talking here." Hand on hip, she waited for the ancient god to move away, out of the building.

"What's she doing here?" Odin asked, breath hot and meaty.

He grimaced. "Shit happens."

"Don't play with me, Sweeney. I know shit. This country is my chessboard and Laura Moon being alive isn't part of this game."

"What am I supposed to do about it? I killed her for you. I fought Shadow." He made a face. "That was all our deal was." He glanced away from the old man for a minute. She and Shadow were talking low. He could only see her face, talking animatedly and fast.

"I always have more cards up my sleeve. You should know that." Wednesday tutted, noticing his distraction. "You sleep with her?"

"Ain't none of your business."

The old man chuckled, already trying to find a way to work this into an angle that moved pieces in his favor. "Ah, there is nothing like a little murder to spice up a relationship. Wonder how Shadow's gonna take it."

At that moment, the man in question exclaimed and tossed his hands out and left. She hesitated before disappearing after him.

"Ah," Wednesday said again. "There's your answer, isn't it?" Tucking his arms around himself as if he  _were_  just a chilled old man, the old norse god walked toward the huge meeting table and sat down in the head seat, leaning back against rough wood posts.

"Fucking hell," he growled, stalking out of the barn and heading toward town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She finally found him, the next morning, passed out in what appeared to be the remnants of a bar fight. "Hey," she said, kicking his boot. He didn't budge. She sighed and leaned down, leveraging her hands on her legs above her knees. She sucked in a breath and raised her voice. "Hey, ginger minge, someone's stealing your coin!"

He didn't exactly jump up, but his eyes opened and his limbs jerked around from their night sleeping in disarray on the floor. "The. Fuck," he muttered, making a face at the taste of his own mouth.

"Morning, sunshine," she said, straightening up and crossing her arms.

He glared up at her and touched his face where blood had dried, matted into his beard. "The hell you doing here?" He got himself up slowly, wobbly, as she watched.

She was sick of her life of living numb. That felt like so far away, as if it was just a story she remembered being told. She enjoyed living. This second chance was  _everything_. "We still have a god to kill," she said, biting down on her bottom lip as he leaned on the back of a bar stool and scrubbed calloused fingers across his eyelids. "Why'd you run off?"

He dropped his hand like lead to his side. "No reason." He shook out his hand and a couple gold coins dropped onto the counter. He pointed at the annoyed bartender who was watching both of them warily. "That's real. Sorry 'bout the table." He glanced down at the remnants of a wooden table that had served as he bed for the night.

"Just get outta here, woulda?" the bartender said, staying far away from them.

She gave him what she hoped was an apologetic smile and practically shoved the tall ginger haired man out the door and into the overcast morning. They walked in silence for a few paces before he stopped, stretching his arms, his neck, looking at the sky through slits for eyes.

"Why'd you run off?" she repeated, placing herself directly in front of him, arms crossed. He could pick her up light as a feather, but without her strength, all she could do was try to get in his way until he listened. "And don't give me any bullshit."

He looked at her and the sorrow and what had to be betrayal written across his features, in his eyes, stung her. She was still getting used to having  _her own_  feelings, she hadn't quite remembered that other people had them too.

"I figured you didn't need me anymore. I brought you to the old man. Killing a god can be as easy as a shot to the head, or heart. And you get your  _puppy_  back once Odin's gone for good." He reached up to pluck the cigarette from behind his ear. He felt around in his coat for his lighter and cursed when he couldn't find it.

"So you were...jealous?" He  _had_  seen her talking to Shadow, but he obviously hadn't heard the conversation.

"No." The unlit cigarette bobbed between his lips.

Her expression softened from confusion to…kindness. She hoped. She was still getting a grip on  _feeling_  again and some emotions were easier than others. "I showed you attention and you think I'm going to leave now. Go back to Shadow, buy another house, have some kids?"

 _Hurt_. That's what she saw there in his face.

"Listen. This world is...fucked up. More than I ever thought, actually." She frowned a little. "I don't want Shadow. My love for him is long gone, with that other me that died. All I want to do now is kill the god that killed me. No matter what it takes."

He chuckled. It was bitter. "Tell me, what's your plan after you kill Wednesday?"

"No idea," she said honestly. Apparently he wasn't as bloodthirsty as she was. "Does it matter? I thought all you old gods wanted was to be believed in again."

"Superficial belief don't mean shit, Laura."

She sucked in a breath like she'd been slapped. "Did you ever think people stopped believing in you because you're such an ass?" She kicked his shin like she was a child and spun around, nails digging into the flesh of her palm as she stormed away.

"Probably!" he called after her. Then, offhandedly, a couple seconds later, "Cunt!"

She growled and stalked all the way back to the barn behind Ibis and Jacquel, the meeting place, blood on fire. Wednesday's car was gone which meant Shadow had also left, but Anubis sat at the big table made of half a tree, reclining in a chair and reading a book. She took out her fury on anything around, kicking at milk crates which wasn't enough. She walked to the table and smashed her fists against it, willing it to crack. It didn't, but her hands shook from the shock.

"Is there a problem?" Anubis asked, his voice smooth. He carefully put a feather in his book as a marker and set it down.

She sank to one of the benches, emotions bubbling up inside of her. It was unpleasant, these twisting, violent feelings. Her hand shook as she hid her eyes and sighed.

"Living after death isn't so easy I take it."

Her god damn chin started wobbling. She hadn't cried in years. She barely counted the few tears that leaked out in the shower in that seafoam green hotel room. "Fuck," she whispered, a tear escaping. "It uh...fucking sucks, actually, now that you mention it."

He made a small tutting sound and moved to sit next to her on the well used bench. "A lot has changed since I found you. There is...magic in you."

"Yep." She sat, back straight, and forced her face to relax, wiping her cheeks and smearing salt water all over her face.

"Magic is not something that the New Gods have, at least not in the traditional sense. Which makes you most akin to someone like me."

"It doesn't matter. There's gonna be some big stupid war and everyone is gonna die and the New Gods will just keep on coming. It's so fucking stupid." She started nibbling on a thumbnail.

"Perhaps. Bilquis has made great arguments for adapting. With that, maybe the Old Gods can learn to flourish again."

"And I care about this why?" She gave him her best  _get-out-of-my-face_  look that she could muster when her eyes were still blurry and shiny.

"You are a part of the Old Gods now, Laura Moon."

She swiped under her eyes, skin damp and hot to the touch. "Life was easier when I was dead."

"Was it?" He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. "Something tells me you've been atoning for things you did in life ever since you were drawn back to this plane of existence."

She thought about Shadow. About how she had trapped him with her in a sad excuse of a love filled marriage. He had found purchase in his life, working for Wednesday, and she could forgive him for it except that he still defended the man even after knowing he had her killed. Could she forgive that? This new, vibrant self where she finally felt alive, could she find it in herself to forgive him or would that anger burn a hole in her?

"Ever since I came back, it's like I'm finally seeing the world the way everyone else does. I'm feeling things that I never felt before. Happiness. Contentment. Ease. I used to be nothing but lethargy and boredom and numbness and anger and I hated myself and everyone around me. It's hard finding a balance."

He patted her shoulder. "All humans through time have lived by simply trying to do their best. As much as I don't agree with how it happened, this second life you've been given will lend itself to something good."

She turned to face him. He was wise in a way that normal people weren't. She knew, logically, that this was a person who was thousands of years old and still strong enough to play with his afterdeath magic. And yet he looked like anyone else who walked down the street. Her short thirty-odd years was just a blip, a blink to him. And yet he was the kindest god she'd met yet.

"And what good can I do? I already have a plan but I have nothing after that."

He didn't ask about her plan. She was sure he was curious, but he said something unexpected instead. "It seems to me that you've already started something new, Laura Moon." He stood, eyes flickering toward the gaping entrance to the barn. "Just try your best." He squeezed her shoulder and disappeared. Off to carefully cut and weigh and paint a body on a slab in the house not far from here. On a slab where she had once laid, getting her arm stitched on, her skin painted-which didn't last long because she had no regard for herself in death, much like in life.

She scrubbed at her face with her hands and rested her arms on the table before putting her head down. She closed her eyes and breathed. The barn was clean; it hadn't housed animals for a long time, according to Mr. Ibis. And he would know. He'd been keeping track of the stories of gods and humans all across the world for thousands of years.

Her life's path was like a lightning bolt. A main path, sure but it splintered off in so many directions that it was overwhelming for her to try to see beyond the next day. It was enough to eat away at her happiness, the full feeling she had of finally being alive. It wasn't as bad as feeling maggots rolling around on her rotting insides, but it reminded her of the numbness of her first life. Nothing but unhappiness and depression.

She didn't want to go back to that again. She had too much to live for...if she could just figure out what it was she  _had_.

"This seat taken?" She only knew one person with a voice like that.

She kept her eyes closed. "See anyone sitting in it?" she said, her voice not nearly as sharp as it should have been.

The flick of a lighter that he must have found somewhere. He was sitting close. She couldn't feel body heat the way she could when she was dead. It was easy when she was dead because people felt significantly warmer than she did. Now she was just as warm as anyone.

But like Anubis had said; she had magic in her now. Perhaps she'd always be able to tell when he was near because of it.

Finally, she opened her eyes, swallowing down the film on the back of her throat, hoped her face wasn't puffy and disgusting from her first cry in years, and propped her head up on one hand. "What  _does_  a Mad King want?"

He sat forward too, arms resting against the table. It was a comfort, something so sturdy. She was grateful for the support. "He wants lots of things. Money, power, women." Pause. "Respect, attention, honor."

She wrinkled her nose and tried to see him like she saw Anubis: someone who was so old that she couldn't wrap her head around the numbers acquired with his age. But she couldn't, not really. All she thought about when she looked at him was an old, mild fury, his hands on her skin, the way he looked surprisingly soft and gentle when he'd just fallen asleep. What she saw was the man who gave her a new life, the kind of new life that she'd desperately wanted before but had never been able to achieve.

Robbing a casino had nothing on the magic of life pumping through her veins.

"And what does an Old God want?" she asked, her voice small.

He pressed his fingers together into a steeple. Clenched his jaw. "The same things, mostly. Power, respect, worship, true worship and love and undying fealty. Battles won, blood on my hands…" He paused and looked at her then.

The small human woman who was so determined to kill an Old God that she'd let herself get attached to someone who was thousands of years old. A demoted god, a big broken thing like her.

"Doesn't really matter now does it?" he said, pulling a coin,  _the coin_  out of the air and holding it in his hands. "I'm neither of those things any more."

She sat up fully and took in a deep breath, tucking one leg under her so she could face him. "So what do you want now?"

He thought about it. For a while. She didn't even try to coax him into an answer sooner. This was probably their nicest exchange they'd ever had; she didn't want it to turn into a yelling match. "I'm honorable still. I still have favors I owe to Wednesday but I...I'll kill him with you. Can't say I want to do it for him, but I want to do it for you."

She smiled, just enough.

"And we need a special weapon for that. I've been thinking. There's a tree-"

"You didn't answer my question. What do  _you_  want? To be believed in again? Maybe people do believe in you, but differently, you just can't see it."

"It's why I'm so strong, eh?" He mocked her good intentions. Because he wasn't superhumanly, godly strong, now was he? Even with his coin back.

She sighed and clasped her hands in her lap. "Do you not want me?" The rest of the sentence got caught in her throat- _to believe in you_ -and she was left with that desperation instead. She hated herself a little for that. She wasn't the girl who begged a man for anything. She told and received.

"I think we're both old enough to know when a good time's just a good time."

"God," she tilted her head back and groaned. "You're fucking impossible. You want loyalty, right? That's what fealty is...basically." She waved a hand and forced him to look at her. "You may be a complete and utter imbecile, but I'm sitting right here. I...I trust you to help me kill Wednesday, Odin, whatever we're calling him this week. the Mórrigan said that she would see me again and how would I find her without you? If we're talking Old Gods, I'm sure Fate has to be one. Different incarnations all across the world like all those Jesuses. When I was little, all I wanted to do was believe that there was magic in the world but then I grew the fuck up and learned that life was nothing. I had to die to learn that that shit that I wanted when I was a kid? It's real. Hey!" He'd turned away with a shake of his head and she slid forward on the bench, gripped his shoulder, grounding him in this moment. "Fate has to be real too. And maybe we're supposed to stay together, until I figure out what my path is."

"Fate, eh?" He turned then and really looked at her. She almost liked it better when they were fighting. His gaze was  _intense_  in a way that made her feel small and important at the same time. "I s'pose so." He lifted a hand and tilted her head this way and that gently with a finger hooked under her chin. "Feel like I've seen your face a couple times through the centuries, here and there. Your spirit." Dropped his hand to tap her chest, much in the same spot his coin had once settled, though now it was once again hidden away. "Perhaps, undead wife."

"I'm no one's wife," she said, tossing her hair back from her shoulder. Reminding him. "Death did us part. And also yesterday," she added with a shrug. Shadow...there was too much to unpack there, but they were done with the whole husband and wife thing. They weren't on the opposite sides of the war, but they weren't on the same side either. She was planning on killing his boss now, wasn't she? But it didn't really matter. "We're through. Like I told you."

"Aye," he said softly.

She sucked in one last breath as he dipped his head and twisted away on the bench. "You say you want people to worship you and while I'm not about to go down on my knees for you since you made it pretty clear you weren't going to chance that after y'know...I do believe in you. And you're stuck with me. I'll take your coin again if it'll make you feel better about having me around."

"Not a fucking chance," he said, quickly.

The smile that came to her face was small, but it was enough. "So this tree? Is it a super duper fucking special tree?"

"Yep," he nodded, standing. He stepped over the bench and she quickly scrambled to her feet atop it, grabbing his arm to stop him. The added height was nice. She draped her arms around his shoulders.

"Where is it?" She tilted her head to the side.

"In a memory. In the land of the dead."

Pause. "Of fucking course it is."

"There's field and a goddess and...it's unconventional but we'll get a branch from the tree and it is a powerful enough weapon to be able to kill even the strongest of gods. I owned it once," he added, tilting his own head.

"Oh?" Eyebrows raised. "Cocky much?"

"Aye." A grin to hide the figments of pain behind his eyes. She'd really fucked him up, but she could fix it. She hoped.

She shrugged a shoulder. "I'm not really complaining," she laughed lightly and then she kissed him. His hands on her hips burned through the fabric of her dress and she pulled him close, pressing her body against his. A beat, a breath, and a whispered, "Fuck me" command and her back was on the table and he was draped over her and her legs slid around his hips, her dress pooling at her hips.

They would go to this field and find that tree in a dead memory or whatever needed to be done, and they'd kill Odin. She wasn't going to go half-in with her murder plan; this was all in. She was going to make it so against all odds.

She'd be just a human girl who slayed a god, was resurrected by magic, who slept with one of the most ancient gods in shitty hotel rooms across the USA. It sounded like a pretty good way to start off her new life.

Whatever was after was  _after_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm always nervous about OOC stuff, especially when a couple actually y'know, ends up together. But I hope I tied this together nicely enough with Sweeney feeling his mortality (and just mortality in general) and Laura learning that EMOTIONS ARE A THING THAT EXIST. Just know that they spend most of their time fucking and arguing so that's about what one expects.
> 
> //stops anxious author rambling.


	3. Part Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Partially show, partially my own AU world, partially follows the ending of the novel. AKA novel _**spoilers**_ (the BIG ONES) so turn back now if you don’t want to be spoiled for those things.

They sped down the road, heading southeast and leaving Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jacquel behind them in Cairo. They'd had a meeting in that barn days after Wednesday left, with Bilquis and Anansi and many more gods that she didn't know and he didn't introduce her to. She hadn't been privy to the conversation, staying mostly on an old rickety lawn chair behind the mortuarium, soaking in the sun.

She didn't really care. She wasn't here for a war. That's what she always told him. He could stay and listen to plans and make his own, she couldn't stop him.

They left once the meeting of the gods broke up. Their days had been spent in a sort of suspended time that didn't really feel real. At least for her. They talked around subjects, slept in separate rooms and came together only in moments of desperation when the house was empty, the gods all in the meeting place in the woods or in town buying groceries. The kitchen counters were high and she took the blame for a number of knocked over and broken jars that littered the floors.

She didn't really know what else to do. It was hard enough to work through her own emotions, it was exceptionally harder to try to pinpoint the emotions of someone who wasn't even...well, human. And yet, at times, she thought that perhaps he was more human than she'd been most of her life.

They'd been on the road for hours before it happened. The scream of sirens and flashes of lights. There were no other cars around.

"Shit," she muttered, having no choice but to pull to the side. In the passenger seat, he pulled his hat from where it covered his face and squinted into the light.

The police officer came to the window. "Afternoon, ma'am. Did you know you had a tail light out?"

"I did not," she said, trying to scrounge up some confidence but feeling nervous for the first time with her new-life's emotions. She hated the feeling; it dragged her down and made the back of her throat burn.

"Since you're outta state, can I get your license and registration?"

She arched her eyebrows. "I...I don't have them on me." Not convincing at all. Fuck.

The officer's eyes flickered into the car. "What about your husband then?"

She blinked and slowly looked over at the towering man squished into the Mórrigan's car. And she actually burst out laughing, full on belly laughs while he rolled his eyes and  _pfffft_ d and said nothing.

"Ma'am?"

She coughed and swiped invisible tears from under her eyes. "Sorry, sorry. Ahem. He's not my husband and he doesn't have any ID on him either."

Not exactly what one was supposed to say to a cop. He tapped the top of the car. "Wait here please."

"Was that necessary?" he asked, as soon as the cop was out of earshot.

"Yes!" she said, laughing once again. She twisted the rearview mirror and watched the officer get into his car and pull out a phone. "But uh...we might be in trouble here. Any chance you can wiggle us out of here with some good luck?"

"I'm not a magician. Can't just wave my hands and fix shit."

"Have you ever tried?"

"Yes. In fact."

She scoffed and bit her lower lip. "Then what are we gonna do?"

He shrugged. "See what happens."

The cop came back a few minutes later. "Says here this car is registered in New Hampshire but it hasn't been reported stolen."

"I'd hope not," he said, sitting up a little, stirring up his accent a bit. "I'm in the country visiting. This is my cousin's car."

"I see. And who is this?" The cop pointed to her.

"I'm just here to drive," she replied, as much as it pained her. "Show the sights of the US and all that jazz. We were staying at a shitty hotel a couple towns back and my wallet got stolen with all my stuff in it."

Either his good luck was kicking in or the cop didn't want to deal with out-of-state bullshit because he finally nodded and patted the top of the car. "Right. Uh...well, don't forget to fix your tail light before nightfall. There's a town ten miles up the road that's got an AutoZone."

"Sure thing, officer," she replied, slipping into a big smile. She didn't wait too long before pulling onto the road and driving at a respectable speed. "Was that you, or was that just the cop?"

"Who's to tell?" he shrugged.

This time, there was a suitcase full of clothes, and a large lump sum of money tucked into a floral springtime dress and not just a small bag in the back of the Mórrigan's car. She didn't have to resort to stealing anymore.

"Where are we going?" she asked. "You never told me."

"Ereshkigal," he replied.

"Gazuntite."

"She's Sumerian. Very old. If she's still around, she'll be able to help."

"Right. Get the branch from a tree and it turns into a spear or something like that."

"Something like that. She's hard to pin down."

"I don't even know what Sumerian is so she must be really old." She may not have heard of Bilquis before meeting the goddess of love, but at least she recognized the name of Sheba and that was enough to spark recognition.

"Mesopotamian. And she is."

"What's she going to do?"

"Help us. Hopefully." He gave her a forced smile and directed her until they got hungry. They got food and decided to get a hotel room. Even splurged for a nice place. Like, nice enough for it to have one of those enormous jacuzzi type bathtubs.

It was extra for the bubbles, but since there was a huge wad of cash in their suitcase, she splurged for them and he invited himself in. He leaned back against her slight frame and sank down until his chin hit water.

"Okay," she said, running her hands through his hair. "You're worrying me. What is up with you? You haven't insulted me in days."

"You want me to insult you?"

"I mean." She shrugged. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you're depressed. Again. I thought I fixed that." As per usual, however, she expected sex to fix everything, but it didn't. "What is it? Are you worried about this whole war? Can't you...just not deal with it?"

"That is not a luxury I have, love," he said, running his hand along her leg under the water.

She thought about all the things that could have done this. He'd seem reasonably okay for a few days, those days between Ithaca and Cairo. "Is it something about the person you saw in New York?" She didn't know much about that. Besides his small rant about nans and faded memory.

"It's a lot of things. Every little thing is coming together. Wednesday said the country was his chess board and we were all his pieces. Shouldn'ta really surprised me but makes you think about free will, doesn't it?"

"I don't believe that one person has the power to manipulate an entire country, if that's what you mean."

"Every single thing about this feels wrong. The air, the seasons, the invisible lines connecting us all...shit is wrong."

She slipped her arms around his shoulders, cheek against his hair. "If you're feeling this way because you helped make me alive again...I mean Easter said that she couldn't undo this, because I was a sacrifice. Maybe I was supposed to stay dead."

"There's loopholes in everything. Have you  _never_  read a single myth or legend?"

"Not really," she confessed. "This is America. We don't really acknowledge other cultures all that much."

"Fuck America."

"Yep." She smiled the tiniest bit. "When do we get to...Ereshkigal?" Thank fuck she didn't butcher the name.

"Tomorrow. If she is where I think she is."

"Okay." She shifted a bit so she could rest a hand on his beard and lean down and kiss him without either of them accidentally drowning. She kissed him long and hard until he was long and hard and they fucked on the bed and then they both got a bit drunk at a nearby bar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The meadow was nice, greener than anything else around, sprinkled through with yellow and purple flowers. She crossed her arms and wished for the comfort of the Mórrigan's car a few yards down from the hill.

He stood there, inspecting...something, taking up more space than needed, as usual, plucking a flask out of nowhere and sipping at it. "Yep, this is the place," he said finally. He was pretty sure, at least. Ereshkigal was hard to pin down, her spirit and belief was so small, he wasn't even sure if she was still kicking, or if she even went by Ereshkigal anymore.

She sighed, arms dropping to her sides. "Okay, so what now?" This was his plan, after all, she was just going along with it. She knew only the basics.

There was a soft  _thwip_. Something hit the ground in a tiny explosion of flecks of soil and shredded blades of grass.

The air around her ran cold and she glanced down. Blood bloomed across the chest of her dress. "Fuck," she gasped out before her legs were gone and she was falling.

"Shit!" He didn't catch her, but he was there a second after she hit the soft grasses. Blood soaked her dress, harsh and violent, from just below her left collarbone. He pressed a hand to the area and she groaned from pain. "Dammit, dammit, dammit."

"Hey," she said, feeling mostly cold, but electric. This wasn't like getting shot when she was dead. This was way worse. "Guess your face's the last thing I see before I die. Every time." She tried to laugh but only coughed.

Her blood soaked the ground as her body crushed flowers.

"The hell if you're dying today," he said, lifting bloody hands and scrambling around  _nothing_  for something. He plucked a piece of gold from that nothing and held it up. She saw the etches on it and knew exactly what it was. She shook her head, but he pressed it into her cold, sweaty palm, wrapping her fragile fingers around it and folding her arm across her chest, keeping the coin close to the wound.

He had no idea how long it would last. He jumped to his feet, spotted a retreating fleck of black and ran, faster than he'd had to move for a long time, though fueled by anger and rage. He caught up with the shooter and grabbed the black coat, planting his feet and yanking the man back. But he was not a man; just a faceless, fleshbag who worked for Tech Boy Wonder and Mr. World.

The thing flickered with a face and lifted the gun but he knocked it away and slammed his foot into what he guessed were ribs. The thing bled well enough and the faceless face caved in the same as any other.

Hands bloodied and bruised, he made his way back to the almost dead girl in the field. She was still breathing, though barely, her eyes taking in the blue sky, the white clouds.

He'd be damned if he was going to let her be a sacrifice twice over in this insane war.

"Bastard," he muttered, kneeling down.

"I miss being dead," she breathed out. She was still losing a lot of blood. His coin would keep her soul with her body even if  _it_  died again. But they'd gone through so much to get her life back. "I don't want to die again. Not now."

"You won't." He kept his face steady as he lifted her up amidst hisses and cries of pain. The bullet went straight through her shoulder blade and through the front of her. The Mórrigan's car was bare, the suitcase holding nothing but clothes and money; they had nothing to sew her up with.

"Anubis will weigh my heart this time and we both know...I won't be going anywhere nice." Tears leaked from her eyes and her hands trembled, stained with her blood, his coin grasped in her right hand.

"He won't be getting his ruddy hands on you today." He lifted her up entirely then, leaving behind a pool of blood. Her dress soaked up the streams that flowed from the wound. He slid her into the backseat. He'd have to trust his luck not to get them wrecked because he knew he couldn't just jump through to someplace to help her. Not when she was like that, she'd get lost in that horrid nothingness.

The crow cawed in the back window as he slammed the car into gear and roared down the street. They were near a town which was bound to have a clinic of some kind. He was no medical expert, and he could sew up a wound just fine, but he was sure she'd lost too much blood. She may be in a body created by magic, but she was still human.

The crow, Babd, if he wasn't mistaken, cursed to her shape, cocked her head at the bleeding girl and pressed her feathery cheek to the cool, sweaty forehead.

Something big was happening in the next town over, leaving this one ghostlike. He tried to stop the car as gently as he could but he was torn between speed and keeping the woman in the backseat alive.

"Would you kill me for real if I die and I'm still here?" she asked, voice breathy and airless, like she couldn't get enough into her lungs.

"Not a chance."

"People don't get third chances," she whispered out and then coughed, wet and bloody. She was tiny and insubstantial when he took her out of the car and banged his way into the clinic, sporting a nice white floor that was soon splattered with blood.

He wasn't used to dealing with human injuries like this. The clinic was small, but it served as a remote hospital for the area. He'd lucked out, according to the two nurses who were on skeleton crew. He did nothing but insist she keep the coin in her hand and used as much profanity as he could muster, warning them what would happen if she died.

Lucky this, lucky that. From the hospital, to the fact that they'd had a blood drive the previous day and the donations were still here, still able to be used for a transfusion as they x-rayed her shoulder and poked her with needles.

Her blood cooled on his hands and he prowled the hall until the front door bell jingled. He found himself looking at the Mórrigan, tall and pale and wrapped in shadows, like usual. Her feet were bare.

"This is not how I expected we would meet again," the goddess said, putting her hand on his shoulder. "I know what happened."

He let out a breath that turned shaky as he tired to cool his own anger. "You're here. Why? Can you do something?"

"I like this one," the Mórrigan said and stroked his face and called him by his true name. "I'll help you and that girl this one last time. You need to take better care of her."

"She can't be a sacrifice twice over," he said, knowing that there would be no coming back from that.

"Yes, I know." The woman walked into the room where the nurses and the dying girl were. The blood loss was not something the witch could replace; thankfully it wasn't necessary. With most of the parts back in place, she pressed her cold hand to the wound and prayed and spoke in the old tongue.

Birds, a number of deer, a handful of rabbits, and one prime bull in a nearby farm all dropped dead to save the pale, small woman on the gurney, but saved she was.

She opened her eyes and breathed freely and the nurses' minds spun, unable to comprehend how she was no longer bleeding out, how her shoulder blade was no longer shattered, her lung full and healed.

"Hi," she said, frowning up at the woman leaning over her.

"Hello, Laura Moon. I said we would meet again."

"No ritual bath this time," she joked, though she was still unsure what happened.

The Mórrigan smoothed out her sweaty hair and looked down at her sadly, like she was about to give her bad news. She had noticeable wrinkles on her face and her hands were covered in blue veins. "Not quite. Not this time."

The goddess kissed her forehead and walked out of the room, letting the nurses crowd around her. She ignored them, frowning at the warm coin in her hand. She sat up and felt pain in her shoulder, though it was a dull pain, not sharp and new. She put her feet on the ground and stood, swaying. One of the nurses took the needle from her arm. He didn't try to stop her as she walked to the exit.

She made it there just in time to see the Mórrigan disappear and a crow to take flight with a sorrowful call.

"I think this belongs to you," she said, leaning against the doorway in a bloodstained dress, half ripped at one side where they'd cut it open with scissors.

He turned around, relief pretty evident on his face. It didn't startle her—she was too confused and shocked from being  _shot_  for that—and instead she just smiled a big, wide smile and held up his coin between two fingers, coated in drying blood.

"You don't want to keep it?" he asked, walking closer.

"No. Not this time." She didn't quite know how to explain it, but she felt like she finally actually understood  _the coin_. The purpose, what it did for him, and she didn't want to take that away. It reminded her of the time when she needed it to even be a walking, talking thing, and gave it back to its rightful home.

The coin was passed from bloodied fingers to bloodied fingers and then she tentatively tested out her shoulder. It hurt and she prodded it with her good hand—it was as if she'd been healing for weeks already. "Magic," she said softly.

"Aye," he said, pulling her close for a mere moment before pointing her in the direction of the car. "We look like a horror show."

"The poor car," she said, frowning into the backseat where the cream seats looked as if they'd had the unfortunate experience of being sat on when some tween had her first monster period.

"And no Ereshkigal," he said.

"Shit. Who shot me?"

"One of Mr. World's spooks." He opened the door and she climbed into the car. "He won't be shooting anyone ever again."

"Good."

He got into the car and started it up.

"Hey," she said, before they started going, turning in her seat and sliding her small, bloodied hands around his arm. "Thank you." And she meant it more than two little words could say. He kept, unintentionally, and then intentionally, saving her life.

"I'm running out of favors to call on," he said. "Try not to make this a habit."

She settled back in the seat and watched him drive, which was a first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She shuffled to the front desk, piled high with papers and dusty books. "Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help?" She hadn't sounded this polite in  _years_. The librarian looked up, thick glasses making her eyes small in her head. "I'm looking for...mythology, stories and stuff. Norse and...Irish. If you have anything."

"Most of what we have is technically for children—"

"Oh, I don't care. Anything is fine." She followed the woman, who didn't need to look at her ancient computer or index cards to know where to lead her through the tall, cramped shelves. The library was homely and crowded like a bookstore, shoved into this small western Tennessee town.

Knobbed knuckles plucked down an oversized, illustrated book, sporting a man with a big red beard and hammer, taking down a giant with grey-blue skin. "Can't go wrong with this to start, dearie. As for Irish...well most of them are just children's picture books.  _But_  I did just get a donation I haven't catalogued yet. Think there was a gem in there."

She trailed after the librarian to the main part of the library, with the wide windows and comfortable seats. The front door was shoved into the corner and the librarian had just come out of the back when the Irishman appeared from the small doorway to the restrooms, nearly knocking right into the woman.

The librarian flat out ignored him and brought the small, green covered book to the awaiting arms of the not-so-dead girl. "Look at this beautiful thing. It's a reprint so it won't fall to pieces as you look through it."

_Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry_  said the title. "Can I just read these here? I'm just passing through, so I don't have a card or anything…"

"That's what the seats are there for. We close at five."

Impressed that they had pretty much anything to do with what she wanted, she glanced at him and promptly turned on her heel and settled into one of the seats. She heard him grumbling, but he plopped down next to her. She tucked the Irish folk tales beside her and pried open the book about Norse myths.

"What're you doing?" he asked after a beat, leaning toward her, keeping his voice low. He seemed actually confused.

She glanced up from the two page spread. "You may know all the ins and outs of all this godly crap but, if you hadn't noticed, America pretty much sucks when it comes to education. We're taught the names of a handful of Greek gods—"

"Bah," he scoffed, clearly unimpressed.

"And that's it. So I'm just reading up on what we're dealing with." Her eyes snapped back to the pages. Her shoulder twinged where it was still healing impressively just a handful of days after being shot, and she pressed her lips together in a thin line. He was antsy beside her as she read about Odin's desire for knowledge, being hung and losing his eye; about Loki and Thor crossdressing to steal back his magical hammer; about the magical golden apples that kept the gods young. She still wasn't convinced all of these things could have ever happened, but she was starting to build up evidence against her own case.

"What else you got there?" he asked after a while, having amused himself by snatching coins out of thin air like he was at a carnival and not a sleepy library in a little American town.

There was no way she could, or wanted to, read all about the Norse gods and goddesses, but since she had a personal grudge against the All-Father, it seemed like a good place to start. She set aside the book, letting it slip between the cushion and the side of the comfy seat. "Nothing," she said, folding her hands in her lap.

"Liar."

She kept up the rouse until the ache in her shoulder was too much and she needed the distraction. She plucked the small green book out from where she'd hidden it beside her thigh. "I thought I'd read up on you too." She shrugged and groaned at the sharp pain.

"Ah," he said. "Dunno if you'll find me in there, love."

"Does...Yeats not write about leprechauns?" She furrowed her brows and flipped open the cover, hoping for an index or table of contents. She found one, though it was long, she flipped through and there, on page 81. "Aha!" She pointed and showed him.

He shook his head, the smallest of smiles on his face.

She knew he was a bitter leprechaun, something that was pretty much the smallest, most insignificant title he'd ever held, but she still thought it was pretty hilarious that was his chosen demotion. She started reading silently, tucking her legs underneath herself in the seat.

' **The Solitary Fairies.**

' **Leprechaun. Cluricaun. Far Darrig.**

'"The name  _Lepracaun,_ " Mr. Douglas Hyde writes to me, "is from the Irish  _leith brog_ - _i.e._  The One-shoemaker."'

On and on it went with a lot of italic words that twisted her mental tongue into knots. There was even a short song or poem—she couldn't tell which—after the clinical breakdown of the who and the whats.

She nibbled on her thumbnail the entire time, eyes growing glossy over all the Irish names for every type of creature. And this was just a handful of pages! "How do you even pronounce any of this?" she said finally, wrinkling her nose. She purposefully didn't try to say anything aloud, embarrassment at the thought of butchering anything digging deep into her psyche.

With a sigh, he plucked the book from her hands and searched the index for something specific. He cleared his throat and glanced up at the librarian, who was immensely occupied and then started to read, voice as low as he could make it. He read passages here and there with the most Irish written, and she was pretty sure he added Irish words that were originally written in English, just to annoy her.

"'The Irish word for fairy is  _sidheóg_. Fairies are  _daoine sidhe_.'" He made a face at the word fairy but continued, reading aloud the passages he  _wanted_  her to hear. "'The gods of the earth. The gods of pagan Ireland, the  _Tuatha de Danãn_...used to be called the  _sheagh sidhe_.'"

"Those aren't real words," she muttered, though an amused smile tugged on her face as he skipped around until pointedly stopping at a certain passage:

"'Do not think the  _Aos S_ _í_  are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them.'"

"All right, all right," she said, reaching for the book. "I get it, you're a very tall leprechaun. Still don't know why you're making those sounds when there's like none of those letters written down, but whatever." She set the book on her lap and read about banshees, because that was at least something that sounded familiar. Most of it still went over her head, but she accepted it and read until her eyes grew tired.

"That's all a load of bollocks anyway," he said, settling back down into the seat as if to take a nap.

It wasn't her choice to stop reading, as something rocked the entire building, much like an earthquake, but accompanied by too big of a noise. Definitely trouble. The book fell from her grasp and she stared around, wishing, as always, for her strength in death back, knowing she was nothing but a human now, no matter how magical her new body was.

Leaving the books open in the chair, she raced after him toward the front door. The librarian was nowhere to be found.

Once outside, he twisted around and pushed her against the wall with one arm. "Stay," he said.

"Not this again," she growled, trying to pry his fingers away but failing. "I go where you go."

He clenched his jaw, debating doing something to piss her off, obviously, before he sighed and cursed, not in English, but in the language she'd just knocked loose in his head. He turned back to peer around the brick edge of the building.

"Ah shit."

"What is it?" She tried to see but he faced her and pushed her back.

"You really need to stay here."

If she wasn't so annoyed, she would have thought that the concern in his eyes was sweet, but she wasn't up for sweet right now. This was supposed to have been easier than this, finding this weapon to then take to Wednesday and end his life, but it was tumbling quickly out of control. Her entire future was hitched up to killing the god who ordered her death as sacrifice and she wasn't going to stop until she did just that.

"If you say that one more time…" She couldn't really threaten him with bodily harm; not any more at least. What she wouldn't give for a bit of superhuman strength right now.

"Fucking hell, woman," he grumbled. "There's an old god, Vulcan."

"Like Spock?"

"No. Like a volcano. Fire, destruction, molten. One of the oldest of us. Turns out that he sided with the New Gods when he started accepting sacrifices in the new world."

"What kind?"

"Bullets. Guns."

"Shit. America loves its guns." She gently pressed against the new scar on her chest from her recent run in with a bullet.

"Indeed. And it looks like he's just as powerful as ever."

"Then we should both go. You told me that guns can kill gods and you're not even a god anymore." Her voice had fallen to a harsh whisper as shouts accompanied the whirling of huge tires. She couldn't see, but she could imagine that they belonged to...a tank? Military trucks? Something big and dangerous.

"There's no chance of that."

"You can't just backstage us out of here?"

"MAD SWEENEY!" A voice boomed out, rumbling the very earth under their feet.

He sighed and shook his head. "'Fraid not."

"Wait!"

He did no such thing, stepping out from the alcove hiding the library door and onto the street. There was indeed an armada waiting, shiny guns in holsters on every hip, as if these humans were Vulcan's own personal army. Vulcan looked as you'd expect: older white man, average in every way.

"What do you lot want?" he called out, just a tiny bit perturbed about the number of rifle barrels pointed toward him. He did have, however, his lucky coin and that's just about all he needed in a battle if it came to that.

"Your boss. You know where Wednesday is?"

"He's not my boss."

"He killed me. With my own blade." Vulcan tapped his temple with the barrel of the hand cannon wrapped in a gnarly hand.

He clasped his hands in front of him and inclined his head. "Shouldn't you be dead then?"

"This is America, Sweeney. Land of the free. Land of more civilian gun violence than any other country. You can't kill me for good."

"Lucky you."

"You disappoint me." With a wave of his gun, a number of his human armada dragged a cursing undead woman from the library.

"Get your fucking hands off me," she snarled struggling from the grasp of two men who dragged her out near Vulcan. She stopped struggling so much when she saw the fifty odd guns pointed at her and her dumbass leprechaun.

"Didn't waste any time coming back, didja?" He looked so calm it was disconcerting.

Vulcan grinned and spread out his arms. "We're making American great again. Aren't we?" His human horde all agreed. "And here I find you, in a fucking  _library_  with a  _human_  doing what exactly? Playing house?"

With a nod, three guns turned to  _her_ ; the barrels cold against her spine and either side of her head. "This is a little overkill," she said, though her voice lost its bite.

"Perhaps." Vulcan glanced at the Irishman and then walked toward the small woman in blue. "I could go old school on ya darling."

She wrinkled her nose. "Gross."

The man, the god, stepped close and said nothing, though his breath smelled like old barbeque and she resisted the urge to cough right into his face, taking in consideration the guns ready to end her pitiful little human existence.

"This one get your dick hard, Sweeney?" Vulcan wheeled around, walking over to the taller man and patting him on the shoulder.

He said nothing, which was as good an answer as words themselves.

"Yep, that is disappointing." Vulcan squeezed his shoulder hard.

"Says the man relying on a bunch of humans to do his dirty work."

"Well shit, I sure am! But I'm not attached to any of them. They're all interchangeable and they know it." Vulcan sighed and rubbed his eyes. "All right, how about we do it old school." With a single hand lifted, the ground rocked and bubbled and split and the guns were dropped from their close proximity, leaving her standing on pavement burning up under her feet. Cracks in the ground revealed veins of fire beneath and the heat was enough to steal the air from her lungs. She squeezed her eyes shut, the heat too much to bear.

"You're fighting women now, are ya? Thought you were here for business with me."

"I'm looking for Wednesday."

"Ask your new boss. Mr. World should know everything, shouldn't he? With a name like that?"

She whimpered, feeling like she was being Force-choked by Darth Vader. And not in a fun way. In a, she-was-about-to-pass-out-and-probably-burn-to-death sort of way.

"All right! Stop. Let her go."

She was woozy, brain trying to catch up with the lack of oxygen. Just when she was sure she was going to reach her fiery death, the air cooled. She collapsed and hissed as her palms burned on the bubbling pavement under her. She gasped for air and choked on it.

She blinked, eyes watering and out of focus, watching as Vulcan turned to the taller, weaponless man and punched him right in the gut. The old god must have had some hell of a punch because he wheezed and offered up his face pretty for Vulcan to smash his gun against.

He straightened up and laughed, face already bloodied red. "There we go. How long's it been since you got your hands dirty, Vulcan?" He motioned with his fingers. "Come on. Have a tussle."

Vulcan hesitated, but was baited. He shook away his human cohorts, two of whom yanked her with them until she could barely see the fight. They all stood around, guns in hand, as if this were a normal occurrence.

Her hands were tingling and burning beneath the skin and she'd never wished so badly that she'd learned how to actually fight. Even just the slightest memory of a combat lesson would have eased her situation, even tho she weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet and would probably injure herself with any gun recoil if she tried to steal one.

Instead, she sat down on cool grass and watched two men fight like they were in prison, fists and goading flying. He was good at the chatting, and Vulcan was...well he wasn't as good at fistacuffs as he was at shooting a gun. But the god cheated and pistol whipped a time or two until there was nothing to  _his_  face but blood.

They still fought though, unncessarily. Her body was far too hot and her hands were killing and all she wanted to do was take an ice cold bath and sleep for a week.

Quite suddenly, there was a sickening sound of knife in flesh and even she jumped up, though her legs were like jelly. The men were close together and she couldn't tell who or what happened. And fuck it if her heart didn't leap into her chest and nearly made her puke from the jolt of it.

But then Vulcan stumbled back and out slid a pretty short sword, slick with blood.

He flicked the crimson stain away and shoved the weapon back into his denim coat where it disappeared into his hoard. She never knew he kept weapons in there.

"You're letting us go now," he said, pushing the Old-New God back a few stumbling steps.

She was just glad to find herself not riddled with bullets.

He came and took her arm and walked away. Away from the guns and the humans and their transportation. He wiped blood from his eyes and she stumbled to keep up with his hurried pace.

"Are you okay?" she asked, which was stupid because he'd been the one to walk away from the fight, hadn't he? She still didn't get what that was about. Why Vulcan came after them, him, and how he found them, and what it had to do with Wednesday.

She told herself that she wouldn't get involved in this war any more than she had to, and yet something niggled at her and told her there was no way out of this.

"Yeah," he said, grabbing her tight and pulling them both into the nothing and everything and the magic pulled at her but she was too tired and hurt to scream.

They landed close to a hotel, a couple towns away and headed there after he'd heaved onto the side of the road from the toll of fight and flight.

She took his money and got them a room while he tried to smoke with a face full of blood leaning against the side of the building, out of sight. It took all of five minutes for most of their towels to be soaked through, pink and red. His face didn't look all that bad, though there were cuts just now stopping their bleeding and a pretty nasty bruise from the first hit with Vulcan's gun.

"You always carry weapons around with you?" she asked, ignoring her own pain and tending to his face and hands because he was letting her.

"A couple," he said. His eyes never left her, barely blinking, most of which she missed as she wiped down his hands and checked for broken bones. There were none. She reminded herself that he had his coin and his strength back and even without it, the number of times she should have actually broken his bones, he'd bounced back quick. "Don't typically use 'em though."

"Mhm, you get by on your charm," she said with a little twitch of a smile.

Satisfied, she washed her own hands of his blood and the pain was like a thousand tiny knives cutting and stabbing. He crawled to the bed and she stripped and slipped into the shower. It didn't have a good stopper so she stood under the lukewarm stream until it got so cold she shivered. Teeth chattering, she pulled clothes back on after drying off.

It was the middle of the day, sun streaming through the half closed curtains. He was stretched out on the bed, resting against the headboard, touching his face and muttering.

She sat down, pulling her legs under her and reached for one of his arms.

He jerked his hand away. "Jesus christ, you're as cold as a fucking Yeti in Antarctica!"

"Sorry," she said, not sorry. "I almost just literally got burned to a crisp by the ancient god of volcanoes so a cold shower was in order." With a sigh, she rubbed her hands together until they were a bit warmer and didn't hurt as much and he let her scooch close and examine his face. He'd be fine in a few days. "Do you know what that was about, or are you as confused as me?"

He shrugged. "An Old God flipped sides, not the biggest surprise in the world. Wednesday killed him and he wanted revenge."

"Why'd he come after you?"

"He's bed buddies with Mr. World and I took out that piece of shit that shot you. Payback I'd guess."

She took one of his much warmer and larger hands in between her own, which were slowly coming back from their Twilight level of cold. "Is that gonna fuck with our plans for the tree-branch-spear thing?"

"Dunno. Said he made a god-killer sword for Wednesday. Probably still has it, the bastard, which could be trouble if we try to kill him. Sword like that'd take out either of us just the same as a god and I don't think we'd be coming back."

She definitely wouldn't. Shifting from her spot and too cold to stay apart, she put her legs on either side of his hips and did her best to absorb as much of his body heat as she could. "What do we do now?" she asked, resting her hands on his chest, which was warm through his shirts.

"We stick with the plan. We find Ereshkigal and get the spear."

"I feel an exception coming. What aren't you telling me?"

"It probably would have been different if you were still dead, but we're not gonna chance killing you again."

"Excuse me?" She made her hands into fists.

"You've got to die and go to a realm of the dead to get to the tree to get the spear. There are steps to take."

"So?"

"So, we kill me and I go."

Pause. "Sorry?"

"I won't be  _dead_  dead. Hopefully. If Ereshkigal still has her juice."

"You're telling me we have to kill you to get the spear?"

"Just a little bit."

If it was for anything else, she would have probably protested and showed her whole hand to the table, but she knew too much about the world of gods and deities now. "And it will work." Statement, not question.

"Not exactly something I do every weekend, but it should, yes."

She took a breath. "Can we leave tomorrow?"

"Yes."

She nodded and kissed him, gently, since he had just been in a fight and her emotions had turned her into a pile of goop ever since her near-death experience. He kissed her back with a bit more fervor though this all felt...different.

This was not just a hot and rough thing to  _feel_  again, but something slow and simmering. It stirred up her delicate balance of new emotions and pulled everything to its limit. They slowly lost clothes and her skin began to warm and tingle but not from near-death.

It was a whole lot less like fucking and a whole lot more like something else she wasn't really ready to admit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He woke up to an empty bed and pulled himself together. Pants, shirt, boots. Couldn't find his jacket. The door stuck when he pulled it open, the sun weakly ascending into the sky.

She was sitting on the trunk of the car, wrapped up in his denim, smoke curling up from the cigarette in hand. He joined her, leaning against the trunk and plucking a cigarette for himself from behind his ear.

"Does it feel like a storm's coming to you?" she asked, tilting her head toward the sky, thinly blue and faintly pink, spiderwebs of clouds stretched across.

He clicked shut his lighter. "War's a-coming."

She breathed out a stream of smoke. "You ever run from a fight before?" Her eyes caught the light in the sky, showing multitudes of amber.

He didn't answer right away, though the sounds of dying men and clashing blades and popping fire filled his ears unbidden. "Once," he said, after a lengthy pause.

She turned to him, surprise written across her features. She vaguely remembered such a conversation, but it was fuzzy, as if it was in another life. Which, of course it was, technically.

He smoked and watched the sky turn burning red for a moment before it settled into a golden blue. "I told you already. I foresaw my own death in battle. And I ran to save myself. Fucked most of my life up just fine on my own, before Wednesday stirred the pot."

She was quiet. Flicked the burning filter to the ground where it fizzled in a tiny dip in asphalt filled with water. "If I had seen my death coming, I would have run too." Pause. "Actually no. I was pretty okay with dying, back then." She spoke as if it happened years ago instead of merely countable weeks and months. "But now? I  _really_  would prefer to keep living. Is that uh...something you do often? See the future?" She crossed her arms over her chest and tugged his jacket shut around her torso.

"Sometimes," he shrugged, ash falling to the ground. "Don't really control it. It just happens."

"Okay." She hesitated before leaning over and bumping his shoulder with her shoulder. "If you want to run away from this death, I won't blame you. I'll find some other way to kill Wednesday."

He could appreciate her empathy, but he had enough to atone for that this felt only right, didn't it? "This is the way it'll have to be done."

She fidgeted until she turned her whole body to him and shook her head. "I don't get it. You keep...doing things for me. You...you gave me your coin back after you'd finally gotten it back. You brought me to the Mórrigan and she gave me a new life. You're helping me kill Wednesday. I don't get it. Don't you hate me?"

He took one last drag and flicked the remnants away. "Sometimes, but mostly hate myself, don't I?"

"Do you?"

"I killed you in the first place. Don't you hate me too?"

Shrug. "In the beginning. Before I was alive again, yeah." She had always found excuses to bring it up, digging in deep. "And cheesy as fuck as it sounds, I have a new lease on life. As in, I actually want to live for the first time in a long time. Figured you'd want to keep living, too. It's all you ever talk about."

An exaggeration. He tended to talk more about what was, the things he lost, how pissed he was that the world boiled him, god of luck, down to a fucking mascot for cereal. "You can want to live and still hate yourself."

"I did that. Before. Almost killed myself, almost succeeded, but I guess life had other plans for me."

"Aye. Leprechaun and dead wife road trip. What more could a woman ask for?"

She hopped off the car. It barely moved. "And what is it now? The Mad Sweeney and Laura Moon road trip? A god slaying road trip?"

"Doesn't matter what we call it. We're going, aren't we?"

She nodded, handed him a warmed coat and shivered, hurrying back into the hotel to pile on some layers to stave off the spring morning chill. He pulled on his jacket, heat clinging to it in the shape of her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She was thinking about death. And bucket lists.

"You ever been back?" she asked, windows down, air tugging at her hair. It was actually growing again, since she was alive, which was a weird thing because she could  _tell_. Just like the sound of her own breathing, her heart, was so much louder than she remembered from before. "To Ireland."

He hesitated and shook his head. "No."

"You ever want to?"

"Sure I do. But I'm stuck here, along with the rest of us. Immigrants the lot of us."

"So it's not like you won't, but you can't? Is there a rule about that? Are there only gods in the US anymore or something?"

"Far from that. But there are other versions of the same scattered across the world. Originals. Duplicates."

She arched an eyebrow. "Is there another you?"

"There's only one me, love."

An eye roll later, she turned her eyes toward the encroaching horizon, dusk settling in around them in an orange glow. The fact that they were headed to this goddess (for a second time) who was presumably going to be able to kill and potentially bring him back, was far from a comfort. She'd met some death gods and goddesses already; they seemed to all like the permanence of death and therefore found her confounding and  _wrong_.

She didn't know how this one could be any different.

She propped her feet up on the dash and stretched out like a cat in the last warm spot of sun streaming through the windows. Her arm was feeling almost entirely healed, and she had to give it to the Mórrigan: her magic was still strong, after all this time.

"Will the war keep going, do you think, after Wednesday's gone?" she asked after a beat because she was feeling suffocated in silence. She missed their banter. She had enough quips in her to keep it up but there was the whole impending doom thing that was making her kinder than usual.

Her head kept reeling around the softness of his hands on her skin yesterday after witnessing the fight where he'd taken a beaten that would have killed a man and followed it up by skewering someone on a shiny blade. It was a clear violation of the universe for someone to be so brutal and so gentle.

He shrugged. "Depends. Reckon it could keep going, but he's the only one really riling us up. If you hadn't noticed, most of us are just going about our business and then he comes in and fucks things up and makes it impossible for us to do anything but help him. Bastard."

"I did notice that," she said, because the Old God done the same thing to her. "How much longer until we get there?"

"Not long."

And he was right. They drove into a town and down some streets and stopped at a house that was short and squat and painted yellow.

"I thought we were looking for a field," she said, getting out of the car. The grass around the house was bright and there were many flowers growing, but it was still just a lawn.

He shrugged and walked up to the front door. "I thought wrong."

"Wow," she said, sidling up next to him. "You're admitting you were wrong? Did Hell just freeze over?"

"Ha ha."

The door swung inward and revealed a woman. She had a dark complexion, and round features. Nothing about her was harsh or a straight line. "I felt you coming," she said and offered them the space inside. They walked in and found a pretty average looking house.

"I never get tired to hearing that," the small, no-longer-dead woman said with a smirk, glancing around. It looked like the house was lived in, but stuck in the era before technology became a forefront.

"Been looking for you for a while, Ereshkigal," he said, touching and poking at trinkets on a set of open shelves.

"I am not so easy to find," Ereshkigal said, smiling softly. "It is nice to hear that name, though."

"What do people call you now?" he asked, taking a seat on the couch.

"Irkalla. Inanna, mistakenly as she was my sister. And Hecate."

"Like the Greek goddess?" she asked, arms crossed.

The woman inclined her head. "They...synchronized me with their goddess and it is from that name alone that I still exist."

"And how's your power holding up?" he asked, leaning forward, hands pressed together.

Ereshkigal arched black eyebrows and then reached down to scratch the head of a small grey cat that wrapped itself around her ankles. "What is it that you came here for?"

They told Ereshkigal their plan and he explained more than she ever could because she still didn't quite understand why they needed to do the things they needed to do and she was still concerned with the part about him dying.

It didn't sound like it would be a clinical thing, with a backup syringe of adrenaline and a defibrillator and that worried her to the point of pacing and digging her nails into her palms. He seemed unconcerned about it.

They had to wait for midnight, so the goddess prepared and he sat outside and chain-smoked and she joined him, sitting in tense silence.

Eventually, they were brought inside and to a back room that looked like it may be the bedroom, but was in fact a room with no floor, just loamy dark earth. It was clean and void of plants and bugs.

She was reminded that this woman with the kind face was a goddess, and a goddess of death at that, and these things sometimes forced them to live in ways that were entirely unhuman like.

Ereshkigal had him undress to shirt and underwear and then she inspected him like he was a prized cattle in the running for a blue ribbon. Eventually they sat down on the dirt and Ereshkigal sat behind him, running her hands along his spine, his shoulders.

"I need something you love to ground you here," the goddess said, running her hands forcefully through his ginger hair.

She felt a heave of bristling jealousy build and quickly dissipate. "Good luck. He loves nothing but himself and his stupid gold coin."

The dark skinned woman tutted and looked at the smaller woman from under thick eyelashes. "Or something you hate," Ereshkigal said to him.

"That'd be her," he nodded to her though his voice didn't hold a strong conviction.

The goddess thought about it before replying. "In any case, you're the only other thing he brought with him so I'll use you as an anchor."

"Do I have to...do anything?" she asked, kneeling down when the goddess told her to do so.

"Not let me die is the main part, I think," he said.

She ignored him because this was stupid and he shouldn't have to die to help her.

"You just stay here and stay connected. I don't know how long this will take," Ereshkigal said.

"Okay," she said after a few beats. "I've dealt with magic and shit before. How weird is this gonna get?"

"You'll be fine," the woman said.

"You don't have to do this," she said finally, even though they'd had this exchange before and this was the only way. Especially if Wednesday had a god-killer weapon of his own. "You don't have to do this for me."

He looked at her in that quiet, intense way and taped her chest where his coin had once nestled inside of her. "I owe you this much, Laura."

It was only the third time he'd said her name out loud and it reminded her of the other two times and how she'd always found herself bawling her eyes out afterward. She hoped that curse was broken.

"If you don't come back," she said, with a fierce determination that was rooted deep in her belly, "I'll drag you back from whatever place dead gods go myself and hurt you really bad for making me waste my time."

"I'd like to see that." He flashed her a grim grin that she desperately wanted to smother off his face with her mouth but she stood back and crossed her arms and thought about death and about Wednesday and the weapon she needed to stop him.

It would be worth it, she told herself. It wasn't like she hadn't killed anyone before. Her hands were bloody enough for one last murder.

Ereshkigal laid him back on the ground and said ancient words and then he was still, eyes closed, like he'd laid down to sleep. Except his chest was still and she tried not to panic. This was exactly what was supposed to happen. Ereshkigal appeared at ease and that had to mean something, right?

The goddess urged her over and put one hand on his chest and took her hand, connection them, and there was a wave of some sort of magic, some invisible magical line that felt like it ripped her soul in two. It culminated into something that felt like a huge rubber band snapped around her chest and then she could finally breathe.

"Is that it?" she asked, eyes on the still body in the soil, the rotund woman kneeling in the dirt.

"The rest is up to him," Ereshkigal said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It wasn't that he particularly forgot much of anything but a couple thousand years of memories were bound to blur and fade and be tucked away purposefully or on account of their lack of necessity.

Death, even the faux death he was experiencing was peaceful. He didn't panic, didn't run screaming from the hills, flashes of his own demise fueling his cowardice.

He saw Essie MacGowan, old and young, in Ireland, in Virginia. He saw the night of the battle he ran from. He saw those long dead and forgotten, people of the mounds and the trees and the land. They were faces he remembered though they had lost all of their features and remained more of a feeling in his chest than anything. But now, he saw the sharpness of faces, and it was enough to send him into madness if he hadn't already been mad to begin with.

He saw a face he hadn't seen in two thousand years, one in which he was certain he'd never forget, but promises, even to oneself, are lies in the end.

He saw a land before Christianity bleed into the world, before it found his island and he saw a primitive battle between creatures that, for the most part, were forgotten to human memory. He was in the heat of battle, bare chested and blue painted, a spear of power in hand.

The present him tried, unsuccessfully to reach for the weapon because the memory didn't  _need_  the weapon; it had already happened. The outcome was long forgotten.

And then everything seemed to shimmer. He didn't grasp the weapon but found himself yanked back from the edge of battle, from the brink of death.

He sputtered back to life, limbs like dead weight, the core of him old and tired. He saw first the white ceiling and then  _her_  face, though she looked unhappy. Or maybe she looked sad. His head was swimming.

"It wasn't there," he said, the lack of evidence laying in his hands.

"What do you mean?"

"Someone had it already. Shadow." He ground out the last word.

She frowned. "Shit."

He sat and felt a little light now, like he'd forgotten some of himself in the memories. "Why the face?"

She took a deep breath and then pinched the bridge of her nose and then crossed her skinny arms. "He's dead. Wednesday."

Minutes seemed to pass, filled with crickets. "The bloody fucking hell are you talking about?" He didn't know that he'd been gone for days in the real world.

She sighed and motioned for him to get up. He did and followed her from the loam filled bedroom to the hardwood of the rest of the house.

They made their way to the living room and she waved her hand to the space behind her. Ereshkigal was clutching a mustard colored landline with a curly cord in hand. "Not long after you...they...broadcast a truce meeting and they shot his brains out on camera."

The words were hollow and angry and he didn't blame her for it. He blamed himself really, for getting involved, for not moving fast enough. "Fucking hell," he muttered.

"What are we supposed to do now? Is it over, or is this just the start of this asinine war?"

_Us._  He shook his head and stood, looking for his shirt and boots and jacket, which he yanked on. She trailed behind.

"What are you doing?" she asked when he straightened the collar of his jacket. Ereshkigal had put down the phone and watched him with amber eyes. Eyes that  _knew_.

He didn't say a damned thing but disappeared from sight in a blink, traveling through the hoard though this time it felt different. Maybe he really had left a piece of himself in that damned memory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"What a piece of shit," she said for the fifteenth time in as many minutes, swirling whiskey around in a glass, sitting on a well worn sofa. Ereshkigal sat on the armchair, stroking the back of her grey cat.

The goddess had gotten a lot of her life story in the past few days. Without the ability to leave his side less he get lost forever in death and memories, she had been cooped up in the house and it seemed like gods and goddesses of death were more friendly than most other gods. Perhaps it was because they were so used to interacting with humans in emotionally fragile states.

So she spoke about her bland childhood, her depression, meeting Shadow, the casino robbery, Robbie, dying, being alive again, the coin, Mad Sweeney, Easter, Wednesday, the Mórrigan and her resurrection, even about sleeping with the leprechaun and their trip here. The full package.

"Maybe he saw his wife," Ereshkigal said, sinking her long, dark fingers into the cat's thick fur.

She almost bristled. Decided not to say anything and let the whiskey burn down her throat. She didn't want to think about the eons of another person's life right now. She wanted to wallow in her own.

"That was a very long time ago," the goddess continued. "I am fairly certain that she was his only wife. Just the one."

"He seemed to believe pretty hard in one true loves," she muttered, a past conversation floating to the surface.

"True love means a lot to all gods. It means everything to us."

She harrumphed, though she'd never felt judgement from Ereshkigal for her actions, for cheating on Shadow, for ruining not one, but two marriages in her downfall. "Where do you think he went?"

"To the place all the gods are going now. I can feel the pull though I have no desire to go."

"All the gods? Like  _all_?"

"Yes. Those who still exist and remember they exist. They'll all go to the same place. That's what Thoth said over the phone."

"You're not going?"

"No. I'm staying right here."

"I'm going." She stood up and yanked down the short blue top she was wearing and put down her glass. "Do you know where it is?"

Ereshkigal shook her head. "No. It's more like a feeling. I'm sorry." The goddess was so old that her true name wasn't known by any but a handful of anthropology professors and archeologists. There was no need for her to go into battle. Not now, not ever.

"It's okay," she replied with a smile, a small but genuine one. "Thank you, for your help."

The goddess squeezed her hands and said words in a language completely foreign. But it felt like she was wrapped in a blanket briefly, like she was hugged by the words. "Be safe."

"I'll do my best," she said, because she couldn't lie to a goddess.

The Mórrigan's car was still kicking and she got behind the wheel and drove. She tried to tap into the  _feeling_  but got nowhere. She drove in circles, slept in the back seat, ate shit food and wished she had some golden charm that she could use to find a hoard and lead her to where she needed to be.

On day three, she was about ready to give up. No towering ginger man had shown up, and she hadn't seen any other gods. She sighed and rolled down the windows and turned off the music and drove without thinking.

Something walked, appeared, in front of her.

She slammed on the brakes, cursing as the tires screeched and the car lurched to a stop. A girl stood in the middle of the road, crow black hair, fair skin, dressed in black. What looked like blue tattoos or paint shown against the bare skin of the girl's arms. The mystery girl grinned, though it was the kind of grin that was wolfish.

"Hello, Laura Moon," the girl said, pulling open the passenger side door and climbing into the seat.

"Do I know you?" she asked, searching her memory. She couldn't find a single person who resembled this wild looking girl.

"Mhacha," the girl said. "The Mórrigan."

"Did you deage?"

The girl, the goddess, frowned. "I was killed. My home was found and there was death. One of them was my own. Though, if we're being honest, I asked for this. I sent away a letter asking and old friend to do this for me, for him. And this is how I returned, a goddess witch for teenage pagans. They're stronger than some believers, but this is all that remains."

"I'm sorry," she said, unsure if that was what she was meant to say.

"I hadn't chosen a side before, but now my blood is stirring and I'm ready. My sisters are all but faded, but we are here. We're going to the battle."

"You are? I'm trying to get there too, but no one will tell me where the hell it is."

The Mórrigan sighed and brushed hair out of the not-quite-human woman's face. "It is not meant to be found by the likes of you, Laura Moon. Why do you want to go to battle? I thought we were of the same mind."

"I was. I don't care about your god war."

"Then why are you going?"

She gripped the wheel and started driving, a feeble distraction. "I want to see if Shadow is still alive. I heard he was...dead or not quite, holding vigil for Wednesday."

"Hmmm. That is an ancient ritual."

"He apparently stole the weapon I was going to use to kill Odin."

"But Grimnir is gone now. Didn't you hear?"

"I did."

The Mórrigan looked into the backseat, expecting to find something but seeing nothing but a crow's feather on the baseboard and a crumpled up snackfood bag. "Where is Buile Shuibhne?"

"Who?"

"Mad Sweeney."

She gripped the wheel tighter, her hands going red and then white. "No idea. He took off. He's probably at the battle unless he saw his own death again and in that case, he's probably drunk as fuck in Canada by now or something." The second part was only her anger. She knew he was at the battle because he told her he would be, because he owed the world a battle.

The Mórrigan was quiet and nudged the car down a northeast bound route. "I wouldn't worry about him. He's lived through many battles."

"I'm not worried." She loosened her grip on the wheel. "I just don't want him to die."

"Neither do I. And I can see the outcome of battles. Not in faces, so I can't tell you who wins or who dies. I can smell winds of change, blood and fierce fighting. There has not been a battle like this before."

"God," she muttered and then frowned. "He's getting just what he wanted, isn't he? Wednesday."

"I suppose he is."

The formly dead woman sighed. "What's it like, for a god to die?"

"It's strange. Not all that scary, and yet terrifying at the same time."

"Are you...the same, or are you different? Because you look entirely different."

"Yes, I guess I do. The Mhacha you met before was  _old_  and looked as she did way before America. This is how my believers view me now. But I remember some things. Like you, for some reason. Your name is hard to forget."

There was a reason why she kept calling herself Laura Moon instead of Laura McCabe and it was all because it sounded better, more fitting for the world she found herself in. It wasn't particularly for loyalty to Shadow.

"Do you remember resurrecting me?"

"Not really."

"But you know Mad Sweeney."

"He's difficult to forget."

"I guess so."

"Are you going to fight with us, Laura Moon? You're just a girl, after all, with a tiny vein of magic in you."

"I don't want to fight. Unless Wednesday miraculously appears, but then, as you said, it wouldn't be the same god who decided I needed to die."

"No, it would not."

How unsatisfying. The tires spun along the dusty road, bringing the two women closer and closer to the end.

"How did he get there?" the Mórrigan asked. "You still have my car so he didn't take it."

"He, y'know, did the thing," Laura said, motioning with her hands as if it could explain the whole experience.

"Thing. What thing?"

"The thing he does when he can go through the hoard and end up somewhere else."

The Mórrigan didn't look so much like a young goth teen for a moment, her eyes older than time could calculate. "He's doing that?"

"Yes," she answered, slowly, fearful. "He's taken me before. Twice."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah."

"He shouldn't be doing that."

"Oh."

"He really should not be doing that."

"I heard you the first time. Why not?"

"It...it has a cost and he's using up a good deal of magic, of belief when he does. He should just hitchhike like the rest of us."

She bit her inner cheek. The first time he'd offered had been  _for her._  Why in the fuck did he keep doing stupid shit  _for her_? "Shit," she muttered as the sky got darker. "He left so quick, I couldn't even stop him."

"What were you two doing? Where were you two doing it?"

She quickly told the teenage goddess about Ereshkigal, the search through death and memory. And then the Mórrigan said what Ereshkigal had said: "Maybe he saw his wife."

She had absolutely no right to be angry or upset over that, but she was. "That's what Ereshkigal said."

"It's possible if he went into his memories. When the world forgets...well, you can guess. The world forgets. We no longer exist. And women are far more likely to be forgotten than men. She probably only lives in his memories for now and when you have as many memories as we do…"

"You compartmentalize?"

"To put it one way."

She thought about it. Hidden memories in a place for hidden things wasn't too outrageous. She still hated the riled up jealousy in the pit of her stomach. She almost missed the maggots.

"What do we have here?" the Mórrigan said after about an hour, pointing with a blue and black tipped finger at a figure walking along the side of the street.

She didn't want to stop, but she slowed down, surprised to see who it was. "Salim, not Salim?" she called out.

He smiled, that true, bright smile and leaned into the windowless space. "Laura! You're no longer dead."

"No, I am not." She smiled back, though hers was sadder. "What are you doing? Where's your Jinn?"

"Gone to fight. They all have. He said Grimnir's death has forced everyone to choose a side." He saw the teenage girl in the passenger seat. "Who are you?"

"Mhacha," she replied. "One part of the Mórrigan. We're going to the battle."

"Can I join you?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," she heard herself say. He climbed into the back seat. "Where is your husband, Laura?"

"Oh." She kept her eyes on the road and off the rearview. "He's dead. Or dying. Or maybe he's living again now. I honestly don't know. He's holding Wednesday's vigil. Or maybe it's done. I don't know."

"I see."

"I've been traveling with...Mad Sweeney."

"Oh!" His tone told her that that was the last thing he expected her to say. His tone told her that he thought the two of them were like cats and water. "I thought you two hate each other."

"We do."

The Mórrigan laughed a little, knowingly, digging into her brain unwelcome.

They reached Rock City by the time the sky was completely dark. Stars twinkled far away. She pulled into the gravel and the Mórrigan got out first. "I have to go," the girl said, and then she did. Just like that, she was gone.

She crossed her arms and looked up at the sad excuse for a mountain. "Does this feel particularly godly to you?"

Salim produced a rug from the bag he'd brought with him. "I don't know."

She watched him set down the rug and felt the need to  _do something_. "You should stay out here. If there's a battle...no offense, Salim, but you don't strike me as the fighting type."

"You would be correct." And he stayed.

Without the worry of having to keep an eye on him, she walked inside. Everything was closed up, but she walked through anyway. She was quiet, holding her breath as if she expected to be ambushed or something.

It wasn't so much an ambush as an intrusion. And it was her who was doing the intruding. She heard voices, one slick but pixely, the other shaky and young. She hid in an alcove and clamped a hand over her mouth and listened to Tech Boy jabber, his brain broken, to Mr. World, who wasn't really Mr. World, now was he?

The pieces fell into place as she thought about this whole mess and she felt sick and riled up all at the same time. And then she heard the death of the Technical Boy and stayed as still as she possibly could as Mr. World, as Loki, the trickster god, walked away, leaving the glitching body of a New God there in the janitor's closet.

Once alone, she gasped and sucked in air and ran her hands through her hair. "Holy shit," she said, and repeated a handful of times.

This battle was completely meaningless. What the fuck. Everything had been for one selfish man's greed. Her death, a sacrifice for a god she didn't even believe in. And what about Shadow?

Shaking her head, she stumbled back outside. Salim was sitting on a bench, prayers done, eyes closed. Perhaps he was asleep.

It was then that she saw a man in a jacket and a stick in hand walking toward the entrance. She forgot that she was human and she could die again and this time permanently.

She walked up to the man and held out her hand. "That's mine," she said. The man was small, but he was presumably some kind of god and she knew better than to fuck with fully fledged gods.

"Is it?" He tilted his head and looked at it and then shook his head. "I don't think so. Who are you?"

"You don't remember me?" Oh, because now with a look, she remembered him. Not his face, of course, but the way he talked and walked. Like those guys on the train that she and the leprechaun kindly decimated together. And while she could none of those things now, she was still quick and underestimated.

But it turns out that it wasn't necessary. Because just then, a woman appeared and killed him. A knife right to the throat. He went down as easily as any human.

"Thank you?" she said, unsure.

The woman, eyes in a frenzy, had blue tattoos on her skin and crows feathers in her hair. "The battle will begin soon, Laura Moon," she said before disappearing again.

With time ticking away, she grabbed the branch, which was still a branch in her hand and raced back into the caves.

There, she found Mr. World, found Loki, who underestimated her like all the rest. He gave her the key and she stabbed him, quite forcefully through the chest. He should have died like the man in the lot, but he was an Old God and they didn't die as easily.

She heard Wednesday's voice in her ear, heard Loki's blood soaked voice yell, " _I dedicate this battle to Odin!"_  and then she was  _pushed_.

One moment, she was in the cave in a simple American tourist trap and the next she was in a field, in an arena, in a shifting world that wasn't really her world. She could barely breathe as she saw what could only be multitudes of gods, new and old, battling. Bullets rang out and Old Gods disappeared like they'd never been.

She struggled to suck air into her lungs. She knew, frantically, that she wasn't meant to be here.

Just as she's sure she's about to die, someone grabbed her around the waist and yanked her. She gasped in fresh, cavey air and found herself looking at Shadow.

"Laura? What are you doing here?"

She shook her head, mind whirling. "Mr. World...Wednesday. They're working together. They were." She killed Mr. World...Loki because if he was Wednesday's cohort, he had enough of a hand in her death as Wednesday. She had her revenge, but it didn't feel like it.

"I know," Shadow said, sadly.

"You do?" She frowned.

"I just found out. He's also my dad. Wednesday. I mean."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. And I gotta go."

"What?"

"The battle. It's meaningless. I have to stop it before he wipes out all the Old Gods and the New Gods and tries to take this country for himself."

And then he was gone, just  _poof_  like some kind of magician.

She sat there for a while before she got to her feet, the sound of helicopters in the air. She walked outside into the cool air and squinted up at the mountain where she could see no battle.

"Is that man dead?" Salim asked, looking at the crumpled figure on the ground.

New Gods didn't disappear like Old Gods, it would seem.

She stepped around the body and walked with Salim to the edge of the parking lot. "He's dead. And Shadow is here. He's trying to stop the fighting. It was all...fuck, it was all  _nothing_."

"What do you mean?"

"Wednesday wanted to have this battle, kill all these gods, just to give himself a boost of new found power. What kind of god would be built off of the sacrifice of other gods?" She shivered to think about it.

Time trickled by until the sun came up and Salim prayed not once but twice and she didn't take her eyes off the mountain. And then, she saw it. Slowly, people started to trickle away in groups, coming down to take over cars and busses and motorcycles in the parking lot.

She'd be lying if she didn't find herself climbing onto a bench to peer over the crowds for a single person. She saw the Mórrigan, like three women in one, and the goddess smiled to her and pointed and she followed the extended finger to find a tall, red haired son of a bitch.

She climbed down and walked toward the grassy knoll and saw him talking with a short man in a god damned sweater vest, who was tucking a bit of red fabric into old man slacks. Whatever type of creature or god the small man was did not immediately strike fear into her heart and she wondered what a man in a sweater vest was doing in a war anyway.

"Sweeney!" she yelled. She was so angry and she didn't even know what held the most of her anger. The fact that he'd ditched her. The fact that he hadn't bothered to even say goodbye before toddling off to a goddamn war in which he was pretty much fated to die. The fact that any of those things ruffled her feathers so much was just as aggravating. She hadn't asked for these stupid fucking  _feelings_.

Her voice was reed thin and she swore it just kept getting caught by the wind but then he spotted her and the sweater vest man stepped away. He saw her and he looked sheepish and annoyed and perhaps a little guilty.

"What the hell!" she yelled once they were close enough. She stopped walking and he stopped walking. "What the fuck! Who gave you the fucking right to just  _leave_? I was stuck a god damned goddess of death's house. And what exactly where you doing? Camping with your fucking fairy buddies?"

"You found me, didn't you?"

"Yeah! Only because the Mórrigan showed me the way. You were just…" She shrugged and tossed her arms out. "Coming here to die in battle because of some stupid fucking obligation. Did Shadow tell all of you? How stupid do you feel now? Huh?"

"Gods are fucking bastards."

"Exactly! How many people do you know who just died for  _literally_  nothing?"

He took a deep breath and looked around. Some wounded deities were being helped out. Most bodies were gone, but the helicopters still swung around in the sky like vultures. "Too many. For nothing. For one single god. Played us all."

She huffed and crossed her arms. "Is that all you're gonna say?"

He blinked. "You want me to apologize to you?"

"Yes!"

"All right. I'm sorry I couldn't get the god killing spear for you."

"I don't fucking care about a spear. And I ended up getting it anyway and I killed Mr. World."

"You did?" He was mildly impressed.

"He was working with Wednesday and had as much a hand in my death as Odin himself." She shook her head. "It doesn't matter."

"You got what you wanted didn't you?"

She sighed. "I guess." Pause. "Are you hurt?" There was blood on him and she couldn't tell whose it was.

He looked down at himself and rubbed blood off his hands onto his jacket. "Nope. You okay?"

She bit her lips and tried to sort out her thoughts and her feelings because they were a nuisance and she had gone so long without them that she wasn't sure what to do with them. She'd killed one of the gods responsible for her death. She should feel like a weight was lifted, but she didn't. She felt bogged down, but there was a tiny part of her that felt ready to figure out what exactly she was going to do with her new found life, pesky emotions included. There would be a life after this deflated battlefield, wouldn't there? She would be able to figure out more about herself.

She was a god killer. And she befriended goddesses. And she…

"Fuck," she muttered out and then she closed the couple of yards between them. She grabbed his jacket and pulled him down to kiss her. He leaned in and she pushed herself to her toes and kissed him like...well, as if he'd just come home from a war he was bound to die in. His hands circled her small waist and nearly lifted her from the ground before she let him go and drifted down to the earth once again. "Don't think this gets you off the hook," she said. "I'm just too tired to slap you and you're so tall."

"Aye that I am."

"I'm glad you're not dead," she said and then she punched his shoulder though there was barely any strength to it. "Don't do that again."

"What? Go off to battle? Don't think there's gonna be another one any time soon."

"I meant leaving. Without saying goodbye. I'm human. I like goodbyes."

He nodded and tilted her head up with his index finger and looked her in the eyes, making her feel truly seen. "All right then," he said, sliding his hand around the back of her neck and kissing the top of her head.

She didn't mind the gesture and let him lead her over to the sweater vest guy, who was introduced as Tommy, which was a pretty benign name for a redcap king, but she didn't say that aloud because she knew better than to make fun of a bloodthirsty creature.

Halfway through the conversation, she glanced behind her, toward the parking lot, where she saw Salim embracing his Jinn and then she saw Shadow. She didn't know if he'd seen her kissing the giant of a man at her side, but it didn't really matter did it. Because they were both different people now and he was under no obligation to love her after the shit she'd put him through. Instead, he gave her a small smile and then got into a car with a giant spider and drove away.

And then Salim called her name and waved her over and her mind slid off of Shadow like a soft current over riverbed rocks. She tugged at his denim jacket sleeve and they headed to the parking lot where a not-so-human woman, a leprechaun, a Jinn, a redcap and a man from Oman got into a car belonging to a goddess of death and battle and they drove off. First, to a restaurant to get something to eat, and then off to whatever the future held in a country that was not a good place for gods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *artfully ignores the timeline of Lakeside to make this fic work*
> 
> And we’re done! Finally! I planned just one part of this but I got such nice feedback that here I am with the third part and conclusion. Thanks so much to all of the people who have commented and let me know what they liked about my writing! It means a lot. I hope you enjoyed this last installment!


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